A facility coloring problem in 1-D?

Abstract

Abstract. Consider a line segment R consisting of n facilities. Each facility is a point on R and it needs to be assigned exactly one of the colors from a given palette of c colors. At an instant of time only the facilities of one particular color are ‘active ’ and all other facilities are ‘dormant’. For the set of facilities of a particular color, we compute the one dimensional Voronoi diagram, and find the cell, i.e, a segment of maximum length. The users are assumed to be uniformly distributed over R and they travel to the nearest among the facilities of that particular color that is active. Our objective is to assign colors to the facilities in such a way that the length of the longest cell is minimized. We solve this optimization problem for various values of n and c. We propose an optimal coloring scheme for the number of facilities n being a multiple of c as well as for the general case where n is not a multiple of c. When n is a multiple of c, we compute an optimal scheme in Θ(n) time. For the general case, we propose a coloring scheme that returns the optimal in O(n2 logn) time.