Prophet inequalities consist of many beautiful statements that establish tight performance ratios between online and offline allocation algorithms. Typically, tightness is established by constructing an algorithmic guarantee and a worst-case instance separately, whose bounds match as a result of some "ingenuity". In this paper, we instead formulate the construction of the worst-case instance as an optimization problem, which directly finds the tight ratio without needing to construct two bounds separately.

Prophet inequalities are a useful tool for designing online allocation procedures and comparing their performance to the optimal offline allocation. In the basic setting of k-unit prophet inequalities, the procedure of Alaei [2] with its celebrated performance guarantee of has found widespread adoption in mechanism design and general online allocation problems in online advertising, healthcare scheduling, and revenue management. Despite being commonly used for implementing a fractional allocation in an online fashion, the tightness of Alaei's procedure for a given k has remained unknown. In this paper we resolve this question, characterizing the tight bound by identifying the structure of the optimal online implementation, and consequently improving the best-known guarantee for k-unit prophet inequalities for all k > 1. We also consider the more general online stochastic knapsack problem where each individual allocation can consume an arbitrary fraction of the initial capacity. Here we introduce a new “best-fit” procedure for implementing a fractionally-feasible knapsack solution online, with a performance guarantee of ≈ 0.319, which we also show is tight with respect to the standard LP relaxation. This improves the previously best-known guarantee of 0.2 for online knapsack. Our analysis differs from existing ones by eschewing the need to split items into “large” or “small” based on capacity consumption, using instead an invariant for the overall utilization on different sample paths. All in all, our results imply tight (non-greedy) Online Contention Resolution Schemes for k-uniform matroids and the knapsack polytope, respectively, which has further implications.

In this paper, we study approximation algorithms for two supply chain network design problems, namely, the warehouse-retailer network design problem (WRND) and the stochastic transportation-inventory network design problem (STIND). These two problems generalize the classical uncapacitated facility location problem by incorporating, respectively, the warehouse-retailer echelon inventory cost and the warehouse cycle inventory together with the safety stock costs. The WRND and the STIND were initially studied, respectively, by Teo and Shu (Teo CP, Shu J (2004) Warehouse-retailer network design problem. Oper. Res. 52(3):396–408) and Shu et al. (Shu J, Teo CP, Shen ZJM (2005) Stochastic transportation-inventory network design problem. Oper. Res. 53(1):48–60), where they are formulated as set-covering problems, and column-generation algorithms were used to solve their linear programming relaxations. Both problems can be regarded as special cases of the so-called facility location with submodular facility costs proposed by Svitkina and Tardos (Svitkina Z, Tardos É (2010) Facility location with hierarchical facility costs. ACM Trans. Algorithms 6(2), Article No. 37), for which only a logarithmic-factor approximation algorithm is known. Our main contribution is to obtain efficient constant-factor approximation algorithms for the WRND and the STIND, which are capable of solving large-scale instances of these problems efficiently.

We consider the problem of computing the outer‐radii of point sets. In this problem, we are given integers $n, d$, and k, where $k \le d$, and a set P of n points in $\Re^d$. The goal is to compute the outer k‐radius of P, denoted by ${\cal R}_k(P)$, which is the minimum over all $(d-k)$‐dimensional flats F of $\max_{p \in P} d(p,F)$, where $d(p,F)$ is the Euclidean distance between the point p and flat F. Computing the radii of point sets is a fundamental problem in computational convexity with many significant applications. The problem admits a polynomial time algorithm when the dimension d is constant [U. Faigle, W. Kern, and M. Streng, Math. Program., 73 (1996), pp. 1–5]. Here we are interested in the general case in which the dimension d is not fixed and can be as large as n, where the problem becomes NP‐hard even for $k=1$. It is known that $R_k(P)$ can be approximated in polynomial time by a factor of $(1 + \varepsilon)$ for any $\varepsilon > 0$ when $d - k$ is a fixed constant [M. Bădoiu, S. Har‐Peled, and P. Indyk, in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, 2002; S. Har‐Peled and K. Varadarajan, in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computing Geometry, 2002]. A polynomial time algorithm that guarantees a factor of $O(\sqrt{\log n})$ approximation for $R_1(P)$, the width of the point set P, is implied by the results of Nemirovski, Roos, and Terlaky [Math. Program., 86 (1999), pp. 463–473] and Nesterov [Handbook of Semidefinite Programming Theory, Algorithms, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 2000]. In this paper, we show that $R_k(P)$ can be approximated by a ratio of $O(\sqrt{\log n})$ for any $1 \leq k \leq d$, thus matching the previously best known ratio for approximating the special case $R_1 (P)$, the width of point set P. Our algorithm is based on semidefinite programming relaxation with a new mixed deterministic and randomized rounding procedure. We also prove an inapproximability result that gives evidence that our approximation algorithm is doing well for a large range of k. We show that there exists a constant $\delta > 0$ such that the following holds for any $0 < \eps < 1$: there is no polynomial time algorithm that approximates $R_k(P)$ within $(\log n)^{\delta}$ for all k such that $k \leq d - d^{\varepsilon}$ unless NP $\subseteq$ DTIME $[2^{(\log m)^{O(1)}}]$. Our inapproximability result for $R_k(P)$ extends a previously known hardness result of Brieden [Discrete Comput. Geom., 28 (2002), pp. 201–209] and is proved by modifying Brieden’s construction using basic ideas from probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) theory.

In this paper we present a 1.52-approximation algorithm for the metric uncapacitated facility location problem, and a 2-approximation algorithm for the metric capacitated facility location problem with soft capacities. Both these algorithms improve the best previously known approximation factor for the corresponding problem, and our soft-capacitated facility location algorithm achieves the integrality gap of the standard linear programming relaxation of the problem. Furthermore, we will show, using a result of Thorup, that our algorithms can be implemented in quasi-linear time.

In this paper we present improved combinatorial approximation algorithms for the k-level facility location problem. First, by modifying the path reduction developed in [A. A. Ageev, Oper. Res. Lett., 30 (2002), pp. 327--332], we obtain a combinatorial algorithm with a performance factor of 3.27 for any k \ge 2, thus improving the previous bound of 4.56 achieved by a combinatorial algorithm. Then we develop another combinatorial algorithm that has a better performance guarantee and uses the first algorithm as a subroutine. The latter algorithm can be recursively implemented and achieves a guarantee factor h(k), where h(k) is strictly less than 3.27 for any k and tends to 3.27 as k goes to $\infty$. The values of h(k) can be easily computed with an arbitrary accuracy: h(2)\approx 2.4211, h(3)\approx 2.8446, h(4)\approx 3.0565, h(5)\approx 3.1678, and so on. Thus, for the cases of k=2 and k=3 the second combinatorial algorithm ensures an approximation factor substantially better than 3, which is currently the best approximation ratio for the k-level problem provided by the noncombinatorial algorithm due to Aardal, Chudak, and Shmoys [Inform. Process. Lett., 72 (1999), pp. 161--167].

Let P be a set of n points in /spl Ropf//sup d/. For any 1/spl les/k/spl les/d, the outer k-radius of P, denoted by R/sub k/(P), is the minimum, over all (d-k) -dimensional fiats F, of max/sub p/spl isin/P/ d(p, F), where d(p, F) is the Euclidean distance between the point p and fiat F. We consider the scenario when the dimension d is not fixed and can be as large as n. Computing the various radii of point sets is a fundamental problem in computational convexity with many applications. The main result of this paper is a randomized polynomial time algorithm that approximates Rk (P) to within a factor of O/spl radic/(log n/spl middot/log d) for any 1/spl les/k/spl les/d. This algorithm is obtained using techniques from semidefinite programming and dimension reduction. Previously, good approximation algorithms were known only for the case k=1 and for the case when k=d-c for any constant c; there are polynomial time algorithms that approximate Rk(P) to within a factor of (1+/spl epsi/), for any /spl epsi/>0, when d-k is any fixed constant. On the other hand, some results from the mathematical programming community on approximating certain kinds of quadratic programs imply an O/spl radic/(log n) approximation for R/sub 1/ (P), the width of the point set P. We also prove an inapproximability result for computing Rk (P), which easily yields the conclusion that our approximation algorithm performs quite well for a large range of values of k. Our inapproximability result for Rk (P) improves the previous known hardness result of Brieden, and is proved by improving the parameters in Brieden's construction using basic ideas from PCP theory.