摘要：In the Metric Capacitated Covering (MCC) problem, given a set of balls â"¬ in a metric space P with metric d and a capacity parameter U, the goal is to find a minimum sized subset â"¬' âS â"¬ and an assignment of the points in P to the balls in â"¬' such that each point is assigned to a ball that contains it and each ball is assigned with at most U points. MCC achieves an O(log P )-approximation using a greedy algorithm. On the other hand, it is hard to approximate within a factor of o(log P ) even with β < 3 factor expansion of the balls. Bandyapadhyay et al. [SoCG 2018, DCG 2019] showed that one can obtain an O(1)-approximation for the problem with 6.47 factor expansion of the balls. An open question left by their work is to reduce the gap between the lower bound 3 and the upper bound 6.47. In this current work, we show that it is possible to obtain an O(1)-approximation with only 4.24 factor expansion of the balls. We also show a similar upper bound of 5 for a more generalized version of MCC for which the best previously known bound was 9.
