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Multifacility location problems arise in many real world applications. Often, the facilities can only be placed in feasible regions such as development or industrial areas. In this paper we show the existence of a finite dominating set (FDS) for the planar multifacility location problem with polyhedral gauges as distance functions, and polyhedral feasible regions, if the interacting facilities form a tree. As application we show how to solve the planar 2-hub location problem in polynomial time. This approach will yield an ε-approximation for the euclidean norm case polynomial in the input data and 1/ε.
In this paper we consider the problem of decomposing a given integer matrix A into
a positive integer linear combination of consecutive-ones matrices with a bound on the
number of columns per matrix. This problem is of relevance in the realization stage
of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) using linear accelerators and multileaf
collimators with limited width. Constrained and unconstrained versions of the problem
with the objectives of minimizing beam-on time and decomposition cardinality are considered.
We introduce a new approach which can be used to find the minimum beam-on
time for both constrained and unconstrained versions of the problem. The decomposition
cardinality problem is shown to be NP-hard and an approach is proposed to solve the
lexicographic decomposition problem of minimizing the decomposition cardinality subject
to optimal beam-on time.
In this paper we consider the problem of decomposing a given integer matrix A into
a positive integer linear combination of consecutive-ones matrices with a bound on the
number of columns per matrix. This problem is of relevance in the realization stage
of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) using linear accelerators and multileaf
collimators with limited width. Constrained and unconstrained versions of the problem
with the objectives of minimizing beam-on time and decomposition cardinality are considered.
We introduce a new approach which can be used to find the minimum beam-on
time for both constrained and unconstrained versions of the problem. The decomposition
cardinality problem is shown to be NP-hard and an approach is proposed to solve the
lexicographic decomposition problem of minimizing the decomposition cardinality subject
to optimal beam-on time.
A single facility problem in the plane is considered, where an optimal location has to be
identified for each of finitely many time-steps with respect to time-dependent weights and
demand points. It is shown that the median objective can be reduced to a special case of the
static multifacility median problem such that results from the latter can be used to tackle the
dynamic location problem. When using block norms as distance measure between facilities,
a Finite Dominating Set (FDS) is derived. For the special case with only two time-steps, the
resulting algorithm is analyzed with respect to its worst-case complexity. Due to the relation
between dynamic location problems for T time periods and T-facility problems, this algorithm
can also be applied to the static 2-facility location problem.
We consider the problem of finding efficient locations of surveillance cameras, where we distinguish
between two different problems. In the first, the whole area must be monitored and the number of cameras
should be as small as possible. In the second, the goal is to maximize the monitored area for a fixed number of
cameras. In both of these problems, restrictions on the ability of the cameras, like limited depth of view or range
of vision are taken into account. We present solution approaches for these problems and report on results of
their implementations applied to an authentic problem. We also consider a bicriteria problem with two objectives:
maximizing the monitored area and minimizing the number of cameras, and solve it for our study case.
We consider the problem of finding efficient locations of surveillance cameras, where we distinguish
between two different problems. In the first, the whole area must be monitored and the number of cameras
should be as small as possible. In the second, the goal is to maximize the monitored area for a fixed number of
cameras. In both of these problems, restrictions on the ability of the cameras, like limited depth of view or range
of vision are taken into account. We present solution approaches for these problems and report on results of
their implementations applied to an authentic problem. We also consider a bicriteria problem with two objectives:
maximizing the monitored area and minimizing the number of cameras, and solve it for our study case.
The sink location problem is a combination of network flow and location problems: From a given set of nodes in a flow network a minimum cost subset \(W\) has to be selected such that given supplies can be transported to the nodes in \(W\). In contrast to its counterpart, the source location problem which has already been studied in the literature, sinks have, in general, a limited capacity. Sink location has a decisive application in evacuation planning, where the supplies correspond to the number of evacuees and the sinks to emergency shelters.
We classify sink location problems according to capacities on shelter nodes, simultaneous or non-simultaneous flows, and single or multiple assignments of evacuee groups to shelters. Resulting combinations are interpreted in the evacuation context and analyzed with respect to their worst-case complexity status.
There are several approaches to tackle these problems: Generic solution methods for uncapacitated problems are based on source location and modifications of the network. In the capacitated case, for which source location cannot be applied, we suggest alternative approaches which work in the original network. It turns out that latter class algorithms are superior to the former ones. This is established in numerical tests including random data as well as real world data from the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany.
In this paper we give an overview on the system of rehabilitation clinics in Germany in general and the literature on patient scheduling applied to rehabilitation facilities in particular.
We apply a class-teacher model developed to this environment and then generalize it to meet some of the specific constraints of inpatient rehabilitation clinics. To this end we introduce a restricted edge coloring on undirected bipartite graphs which is called group-wise balanced. The problem considered is called patient-therapist-timetable problem with group-wise balanced constraints (PTTPgb). In order to specify weekly schedules further such that they produce a reasonable allocation to morning/afternoon (second level decision) and to the single periods (third level decision) we introduce (hierarchical PTTPgb). For the corresponding model, the hierarchical edge coloring problem, we present some first feasibility results.
It is well known that the greedy algorithm solves matroid base problems for all linear cost functions and is, in fact, correct if and only if the underlying combinatorial structure of the problem is a matroid. Moreover, the algorithm can be applied to problems with sum, bottleneck, algebraic sum or \(k\)-sum objective functions.
Universal Shortest Paths
(2010)
We introduce the universal shortest path problem (Univ-SPP) which generalizes both - classical and new - shortest path problems. Starting with the definition of the even more general universal combinatorial optimization problem (Univ-COP), we show that a variety of objective functions for general combinatorial problems can be modeled if all feasible solutions have the same cardinality. Since this assumption is, in general, not satisfied when considering shortest paths, we give two alternative definitions for Univ-SPP, one based on a sequence of cardinality contrained subproblems, the other using an auxiliary construction to establish uniform length for all paths between source and sink. Both alternatives are shown to be (strongly) NP-hard and they can be formulated as quadratic integer or mixed integer linear programs. On graphs with specific assumptions on edge costs and path lengths, the second version of Univ-SPP can be solved as classical sum shortest path problem.