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In the Metric Capacitated Covering (MCC) problem, given a set of balls ℬ in a metric space P with metric d and a capacity parameter U, the goal is to find a minimum sized subset ℬ' ⊆ ℬ and an assignment of the points in P to the balls in ℬ' such that each point is assigned to a ball that contains it and each ball is assigned with at most U points. MCC achieves an O(log |P|)-approximation using a greedy algorithm. On the other hand, it is hard to approximate within a factor of o(log |P|) even with β < 3 factor expansion of the balls. Bandyapadhyay et al. [SoCG 2018, DCG 2019] showed that one can obtain an O(1)-approximation for the problem with 6.47 factor expansion of the balls. An open question left by their work is to reduce the gap between the lower bound 3 and the upper bound 6.47. In this current work, we show that it is possible to obtain an O(1)-approximation with only 4.24 factor expansion of the balls. We also show a similar upper bound of 5 for a more generalized version of MCC for which the best previously known bound was 9.
@InProceedings{bandyapadhyay:LIPIcs.ESA.2020.9,
author = {Bandyapadhyay, Sayan},
title = {{Improved Bounds for Metric Capacitated Covering Problems}},
booktitle = {28th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2020)},
pages = {9:1--9:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-162-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {173},
editor = {Grandoni, Fabrizio and Herman, Grzegorz and Sanders, Peter},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.9},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-128759},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.9},
annote = {Keywords: Capacitated covering, approximation algorithms, bicriteria approximation, LP rounding}
}