Fault-tolerant facility location

• Authors: Chaitanya Swamy;David B. Shmoys
• Venue: ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
• Year: 2008

We consider a fault-tolerant generalization of the classical uncapacitated facility location problem, where each client j has a requirement that rj distinct facilities serve it, instead of just one. We give a 2.076-approximation algorithm for this problem using LP rounding, which is currently the best-known performance guarantee. Our algorithm exploits primal and dual complementary slackness conditions and is based on clustered randomized rounding. A technical difficulty that we overcome is the presence of terms with negative coefficients in the dual objective function, which makes it difficult to bound the cost in terms of dual variables. For the case where all requirements are the same, we give a primal-dual 1.52-approximation algorithm. We also consider a fault-tolerant version of the k-median problem. In the metric k-median problem, we are given n points in a metric space. We must select k of these to be centers, and then assign each input point j to the selected center that is closest to it. In the fault-tolerant version we want j to be assigned to rj distinct centers. The goal is to select the k centers so as to minimize the sum of assignment costs. The primal-dual algorithm for fault-tolerant facility location with uniform requirements also yields a 4-approximation algorithm for the fault-tolerant k-median problem for this case. This the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the uniform requirements case.