Complexity and Approximation Algorithms for Fixed Charge Transportation Problems

The Fixed Charge Transportation (FCT) problem models transportation scenarios where we need to send a commodity from n sources to m sinks, and the cost of sending a commodity from a source to a sink consists of a linear component and a fixed component. Despite extensive research on exponential time exact algorithms and heuristic algorithms for FCT and its variants, their approximability and computational complexity are not well understood. In this work, we initiate a systematic study of the approximability and complexity of these problems. When there are no linear costs, we call the problem the Pure Fixed Charge Transportation (PFCT) problem. We also distinguish between cases with general, sink-independent, and uniform fixed costs; we use the suffixes “-S” and “-U” to denote the latter two cases, respectively. This gives us six variants of the FCT problem. We give a complete characterization of the existence of O(1)-approximation algorithms for these variants. In particular, we give 2-approximation algorithms for FCT-U and PFCT-S, and a (6/5+ϵ)-approximation for PFCT-U. On the negative side, we prove that FCT and PFCT are NP-hard to approximate within a factor of O(log^2-ϵ(max{n,m})) for any constant ϵ>0, FCT-S is NP-hard to approximate within a factor of clog(max{n,m}) for some constant c>0, and PFCT-U is APX-hard. Additionally, we design an Efficient Parameterized Approximation Scheme (EPAS) for PFCT when parameterized by the number n of sources, and an O(1/ϵ)-bicriteria approximation for the FCT problem, when we are allowed to violate the demand constraints for sinks by a factor of 1±ϵ.