Workshops, Aladdin Center

October 31- November 1, 2002
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

Facility location problems were first considered by the Operations Research community in the context of locating warehouses to minimize the cost of product distribution. More recent work has demonstrated a wide variety of applications for these problems. For example, facility location can be used to model data clustering, an essential operation in data mining, by replacing the distance metric with a measurement of object similarity. As another example, problems in design of network topologies can be viewed as hierarchical applications of a facility location paradigm. Each of these applications has given rise to similar but slightly different versions of the problem. Furthermore, many different approaches have been taken to producing solutions to these problems. To some degree these differences reflect distinct problem objectives, but in many cases they are also a reflection of a lack of communication between researchers working on similar problems arising from different fields of study.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in facility location problems in the computer science community, perhaps in part due to the above-mentioned applications to the design of computer networks and in clustering of large databases. Computer science theorists have generally viewed these problems from the perspective of worst-case performance-guarantee approximation algorithms, and have produced a number
of such combinatorial solutions for the problem.

This workshop will bring together researchers from Operations Research, Data Mining, Computer Networking, and Computer Science in an effort to discuss and better understand the various forms of facility location problems, and to share useful techniques in approaching them. We hope to place particular emphasis in discussing the integration of facility location models and transportation network design models that have traditionally decoupled in the process of logistic design. We aim to formulate new meaningful models at this intersection and stimulate more work in this area.

The workshop will be a combination of survey talks, new results, and informal discussion. There will be no published proceedings, but we plan to have a web page for the workshop with slides, pointers to relevant papers, and so forth.

Organizing committee: Moses Charikar, Ted Giford, Adam Meyerson, R. Ravi

See the PROBE
Schedule and abstracts
Adam Meyerson's description of all the talks and results/open problems (ppt presentation)