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We consider the online variant of facility location, in which demand points arrive one at a time and we must maintain a set of facilities to service these points. We provide a randomized online O(1)-competitive algorithm in the case where points arrive in random order. If points are ordered adversarially, we show that no algorithm can be constant-competitive, and provide an O(log n)-competitive algorithm. Our algorithms are randomized and the analysis depends heavily on the concept of expected waiting time. We also combine our techniques with those of M. Charikar and S. Guha (1999) to provide a linear-time constant approximation for the offline facility location problem.
Adam Meyerson (Mon,) studied this question.