This paper presents a unified approach for
bottleneck capacity expansion problems.
In the bottleneck capacity expansion
problem, BCEP, we are given a finite ground set E, a family F
of feasible subsets of E and a nonnegative real capacity ĉe
for all e ∈ E. Moreover, we are given monotone increasing cost functions fe for
increasing the capacity of the elements e ∈ E as well as a
budget B. The task
is to determine new capacities ce ≥ ĉe such that the
objective function given by maxF∈Fmine∈Fce
is maximized under the side
constraint that the overall expansion cost does not exceed the budget B.
We introduce an algebraic model for defining the overall expansion cost and
for formulating the budget constraint. This models allows to capture
various types of budget constraints in one general model.
Moreover, we discuss solution approaches for the general bottleneck capacity
expansion problem. For an important subclass of bottleneck capacity expansion
problems we propose algorithms which perform a strongly polynomial number of
steps. In this manner we generalize and improve a recent result of
Zhang et al. [15].