Constrained Geodesic Centers of a Simple Polygon

Abstract

For any two points in a simple polygon P, the geodesic distance between them is the length of the shortest path contained in P that connects them. A geodesic center of a set S of sites (points) with respect to P is a point in P that minimizes the geodesic distance to its farthest site. In many realistic facility location problems, however, the facilities are constrained to lie in feasible regions. In this paper, we show how to compute the geodesic centers constrained to a set of line segments or simple polygonal regions contained in P. Our results provide substantial improvements over previous algorithms