Unreliable point facility location problems on networks

Abstract

In this paper we study facility location problems on graphs under the most common criteria, such as, median, center and centdian, but we incorporate in the objective function some reliability aspects. Assuming that facilities may become unavailable with a certain probability, the problem consists of locating facilities minimizing the overall or the maximum expected service cost in the long run, or a convex combination of the two. We show that the k-facility problem on general networks is NP-hard. Then, we provide efficient algorithms for these problems for the cases of k = 1, 2, both on general networks and on trees. We also explain how our methodology extends to handle a more general class of unreliable point facility location problems related to the ordered median objective function.