The minimax multistop location problem on a tree

In many services (e.g., delivery, or customer pickup vehicles) the service unit usually visits a number of demand points on a single multistop tour. Typically, at a specific time of the day, the unit receives the list of waiting calls and immediately starts a tour of the network that includes all waiting customers. The multistop location problem is to find the home location for the service unit. We focus on the minimax criterion for the multistop problem defined on a tree network. Each potential list of customers is associated with the length of its respective tour and with some weight. We seek for the home location of the unit that minimizes the maximum weighted tour length over all feasible customer lists. We consider several weight functions and obtain results that reveal additional properties of the classical absolute center of the tree.