The Fermat-Steiner problem in the space of compact subsets of the Euclidean plane (Q6174474)

The Fermat-Steiner problem asks, given a finite subset \(A\) of a metric space \((X, d)\), for the points \(P\) of \(X\), for which the sum of the distances from \(P\) to points of \(A\) is minimal. This paper looks at several aspects of this problem when \(X\) is the set of compact subsets of the Euclidean plane, \(d=d_H\) is the Hausdorff-Pompeiu metric and \(A\) consists of finite pairwise disjoint sets. Given finite sets \(A_1, \dots, A_n\), the problem is thus to find a compact set \(K\) such that \(\sum_{i=1}^n d_i\) is minimal, with \(d_i=d_H(A_i, K)\). Given a list of distances \((d_1, \dots, d_n)\), the author is interested in the minimal compact set \(K\) for which \(d_H(A_i, K)=d_i\) (see also the authors of \textit{A. Ivanov} et al. [J. Geom. 108, No. 2, 575--590 (2017; Zbl 1377.51006)]), finds necessary and sufficient conditions for a compact set to be minimal with respect to \((A_1, \dots, A_n)\) and \((d_1, \dots, d_n)\), and provides an algorithm for finding such minimal compact sets, proves that such a set must be finite and finds an upper bound for its cardinality in terms of \(n\) and the cardinalities of the sets \(A_i\).