Reliability problems in multiple path-shaped facility location on networks

In this paper we study a location problem on networks that combines three important issues: (1) it considers that facilities are extensive, (2) it handles simultaneously the location of more than one facility, and (3) it incorporates reliability aspects related to the fact that facilities may fail. The problem consists of locating two path-shaped facilities minimizing the expected service cost in the long run, assuming that paths may become unavailable and their failure probabilities are known in advance. We discuss several aspects of the computational complexity of problems of locating two or more reliable paths on graphs, showing that multifacility path location–with and without reliability issues–is a difficult problem even for 2 facilities and on very special classes of graphs. In view of this, we focus on trees and provide a polynomial time algorithm that solves the 2 unreliable path location problem on tree networks in O(n2)O(n2) time, where nn is the number of vertices.