Covering Uncertain Points in a Tree

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a coverage problem for uncertain points in a tree. Let T be a tree containing a set P of n (weighted) demand points, and the location of each demand point P_i\in P is uncertain but is known to appear in one of m_i points on T each associated with a probability. Given a covering range \lambda, the problem is to find a minimum number of points (called centers) on T to build facilities for serving (or covering) these demand points in the sense that for each uncertain point P_i\in P, the expected distance from P_i to at least one center is no more than $\lambda$. The problem has not been studied before. We present an O(|T|+M\log^2 M) time algorithm for the problem, where |T| is the number of vertices of T and M is the total number of locations of all uncertain points of P, i.e., M=\sum_{P_i\in P}m_i. In addition, by using this algorithm, we solve a k-center problem on T for the uncertain points of P.