A Survey on Facility Location Problems in Dynamic Flow Networks

This paper surveys the facility location problems in dynamic flow networks that have been actively studied in recent years. These problems have been motivated by evacuation planning which has become increasingly important in Japan. The evacuation planning problem is formulated using a dynamic flow network consisting of a graph in which a capacity as well as a transit time is associated with each edge. The goal of the problem is to find a way to send evacuees originally existing at vertices to facilities (evacuation centers) as quickly as possible. The problem can be viewed as a generalization of the classical k-center and k-median problems. In this paper we show recent results about the difficulty and approximability of a single facility location for general networks and polynomial time algorithms for k-facility location problems in path and tree networks. We also mention the minimax regret version of these problems.