Easy and hard bottleneck location problems

Abstract We consider a bottleneck location problem on a graph and present an efficient (polynomial time) algorithm for solving it. The problem involve the location of K noxious facilities that are to be placed as far as possilbe from the other facilities, and the objective is to maximize the minimum distance from the noxious facilities to the others. We then show that two other bottleneck (min-max) location problems, finding K -centers and absolute K -centers of a graph appear to be very difficult to solve even for reasonably good approximate solutions.