General models in min-max planar location

This paper studies the problem of deciding whether the present iteration point of some algorithm applied to a planar singlefacility min-max location problem, with distances measured by either anl p -norm or a polyhedral gauge, is optimal or not. It turns out that this problem is equivalent to the decision problem of whether 0 belongs to the convex hull of either a finite number of points in the plane or a finite number of differentl q -circles . Although both membership problems are theoretically solvable in polynomial time, the last problem is more difficult to solve in practice than the first one. Moreover, the second problem is solvable only in the weak sense, i.e., up to a predetermined accuracy. Unfortunately, these polynomial-time algorithms are not practical. Although this is a negative result, it is possible to construct an efficient and extremely simple linear-time algorithm to solve the first problem. Moreover, this paper describes an implementable procedure to reduce the second decision problem to the first with any desired precision. Finally, in the last section, some computational results for these algorithms are reported.optimality conditions;continuous location theory;computational geometry;convex hull;Newton-Raphson method

On Khachiyan's algorithm for the computation of minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoids

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Given A := {a(1),..., a(m)} subset of R(d) whose affine hull is R(d), we study the problems of computing an approximate rounding of the convex hull of A and an approximation to the minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoid of V. In the case of centrally symmetric sets, we first establish that Khachiyan's barycentric coordinate descent (BCD) method is exactly the polar of the deepest cut ellipsoid method using two-sided symmetric cuts. This observation gives further insight into the efficient implementation of the BCD method. We then propose a variant algorithm which computes an approximate rounding of the convex hull of,91, and which can also be used to compute an approximation to the minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoid of A.. Our algorithm is a modification of the algorithm of Kumar and Yildirim, which combines Khachiyan's BCD method with a simple initialization scheme to achieve a slightly improved polynomial complexity result, and which returns a small "core set." We establish that our algorithm computes an approximate solution to the dual optimization formulation of the minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoid problem that satisfies a more complete set of approximate optimality conditions than either of the two previous algorithms. Furthermore, this added benefit is achieved without any increase in the improved asymptotic complexity bound of the algorithm of Kumar and Yildirim or any increase in the bound on the size of the computed core set. In addition, the "dropping idea" used in our algorithm has the potential of computing smaller core sets in practice. We also discuss several possible variants of this dropping technique. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved