A simple heuristic for the p-centre problem (Q761233)

We describe a simple heuristic for determining the p-centre of a finite set of weighted points in an arbitrary metric space. The computational effort is O(np) for an n-point set. We show that the ratio of the objective function value of the heuristic solution to that of the optimum is bounded by \(\min (3,1+\alpha)\), where \(\alpha\) is the maximum weight divided by the minimum weight of points in the set.