Approximation algorithms for the Transportation Problem with Market Choice and related models

Abstract

Given facilities with capacities and clients with penalties and demands, the transportation problem with market choice consists in finding the minimum-cost way to partition the clients into unserved clients, paying the penalties, and into served clients, paying the transportation cost to serve them. We give polynomial-time reductions from this problem and variants to the (un)capacitated facility location problem, directly yielding approximation algorithms, two with constant factors in the metric case, one with a logarithmic factor in the general case.