Improved approximation for universal facility location

The Universal Facility Location problem (UniFL) is a generalized formulation which contains several variants of facility location including capacitated facility location (1-CFL) as its special cases. We present a 6 + ε approximation for the UniFL problem, thus improving the 8 + ∈ approximation given by Mahdian and Pal. Our result bridges the existing gap between the UniFL problem and the 1-CFL problem.