A Greedy Facility Location Algorithm Analyzed Using Dual Fitting

Mohammad Mahdian, Evangelos Markakis, Amin Saberi, Vijay V. Vazirani

Abstract: We present a natural greedy algorithm for the metric uncapacitated facility location problem and use the method of dual fitting to analyze its approximation ratio, which turns out to be 1.861. The running time of our algorithm is O(m log m), where m is the total number of edges in the underlying complete bipartite graph between cities and facilities. We use our algorithm to improve recent results for some variants of the problem, such as the fault tolerant and outlier versions. In addition, we introduce a new variant which can be seen as a special case of the concave cost version of this problem.