Planar Location Problems with Line Barriers
- The Weber Problem for a given finite set of existing facilities {cal E}x = {Ex_1,Ex_2, ... ,Ex_M} subset R^2 with positive weights w_m (m = 1, ... ,M) is to find a new fcility X* such that sum_{m=1}^{M} w_{m}d(X,Ex_m) is minimized for some distance function d. A variation of this problem is obtained of the existing facilities are situated on two sides of a linear barrier. Such barriers like rivers, highways, borders or mountain ranges are frequently encountered in practice. Structural results as well as algorithms for this non-convex optimization problem depending on the distance function and on the number and location of passages through the barrier are presented. A reduction to convex optimization problems is used to derive efficient algorithms.