Approximating Connected Facility Location with Lower and Upper Bounds via LP Rounding

We consider a lower- and upper-bounded generalization of the classical facility location problem, where each facility has a capacity (upper bound) that limits the number of clients it can serve and a lower bound on the number of clients it must serve if it is opened. We develop an LP rounding framework that exploits a Voronoi diagram-based clustering approach to derive the first bicriteria constant approximation algorithm for this problem with non-uniform lower bounds and uniform upper bounds. This naturally leads to the the first LP-based approximation algorithm for the lower bounded facility location problem (with non-uniform lower bounds). We also demonstrate the versatility of our framework by extending this and presenting the first constant approximation algorithm for some connected variant of the problems in which the facilities are required to be connected as well

Sherali-Adams gaps, flow-cover inequalities and generalized configurations for capacity-constrained Facility Location

Metric facility location is a well-studied problem for which linear programming methods have been used with great success in deriving approximation algorithms. The capacity-constrained generalizations, such as capacitated facility location (CFL) and lower-bounded facility location (LBFL), have proved notorious as far as LP-based approximation is concerned: while there are local-search-based constant-factor approximations, there is no known linear relaxation with constant integrality gap. According to Williamson and Shmoys devising a relaxation-based approximation for \cfl\ is among the top 10 open problems in approximation algorithms. This paper advances significantly the state-of-the-art on the effectiveness of linear programming for capacity-constrained facility location through a host of impossibility results for both CFL and LBFL. We show that the relaxations obtained from the natural LP at $\Omega(n)$ levels of the Sherali-Adams hierarchy have an unbounded gap, partially answering an open question of \cite{LiS13, AnBS13}. Here, $n$ denotes the number of facilities in the instance. Building on the ideas for this result, we prove that the standard CFL relaxation enriched with the generalized flow-cover valid inequalities \cite{AardalPW95} has also an unbounded gap. This disproves a long-standing conjecture of \cite{LeviSS12}. We finally introduce the family of proper relaxations which generalizes to its logical extreme the classic star relaxation and captures general configuration-style LPs. We characterize the behavior of proper relaxations for CFL and LBFL through a sharp threshold phenomenon.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1305.599

Strategyproof Mechanisms For Group-Fair Facility Location Problems

We study the facility location problems where agents are located on a real line and divided into groups based on criteria such as ethnicity or age. Our aim is to design mechanisms to locate a facility to approximately minimize the costs of groups of agents to the facility fairly while eliciting the agents' locations truthfully. We first explore various well-motivated group fairness cost objectives for the problems and show that many natural objectives have an unbounded approximation ratio. We then consider minimizing the maximum total group cost and minimizing the average group cost objectives. For these objectives, we show that existing classical mechanisms (e.g., median) and new group-based mechanisms provide bounded approximation ratios, where the group-based mechanisms can achieve better ratios. We also provide lower bounds for both objectives. To measure fairness between groups and within each group, we study a new notion of intergroup and intragroup fairness (IIF) . We consider two IIF objectives and provide mechanisms with tight approximation ratios