Single facility location problems with unbounded unit balls

In this paper we consider a new class of continuous location problems where the “distances” are measured by gauges of closed (not necessarily bounded) convex sets. These distance functions do not satisfy the definiteness property and therefore they can be used to model those situations where there exist zero-distance regions. We prove a geometrical characterization of these measures of distance as the length of shortest paths between points using only a subset of directions of their unit balls. We also characterize the complete set of optimal solutions for this class of continuous single facility location problems and we give resolution methods to solve them. Our analysis allows to consider new models of location problems and generalizes previously known results. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2003