APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS FOR MULTICOMMODITY FACILITY LOCATION PROBLEMS

Multicommodity facility location refers to the extension of facility location to allow for different clients' demands for different goods from among a finite set of goods. This leads to several optimization problems, depending on the cost of opening a facility (now a function of the commodities it serves). In this paper, we introduce and provide approximation algorithms for two fairly general versions of multicommodity facility location. We formulate integer programming models for these problems, and use them to provide approximation algorithms for the problems that are close to the inapproximability thresholds.