Voronoi Diagrams

0 Motivating Problems
• You work for Google and you are in charge of creating a map (with labeled places of
interest) for a new town known as Megan-ville. Your first job is to be able to program
in the maps app that if someone is searching for the nearest hospital, your program will
automatically compute which one is closest.

• You are a regional branch manager of a chain of Burger Kings. Your boss, Steven, wants
you to group by geography the set of potential households that would visit each store.

• It turns out, Burger King is looking to add another restaurant in your area, but they do not
want to compete with other Burger Kings. Where should they place the new restaurant
so that it is the furthest from any other Burger Kings but still in the region?

1 Definition
Suppose you have n data points on a plane. The Voronoi diagram is a graph that separates the
plane into n regions of influence known as cells (one cell for each data point). The edges of each
cell are chosen such that if you are on an edge, then you are equidistant from two data points.

2 Simple Voronoi Diagrams

1. Consider two data points shown below. What is the corresponding Voronoi diagram? How
would you split the sheet of paper into two regions such that when you are in region 1,
you are closest to data point 1, and when you are in region 2, you are closest to data point
2?

2. Using what you just learned in the previous problem, Draw the Voronoi diagram for 3
points on a triangle, shown below.

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3. Now if we add a data point at the circumcenter of the triangle, what is the new Voronoi
diagram?

4. What do you think the Voronoi Diagram would look like for a square? For a regular
pentagon?

5. Sketch the Voronoi Diagrams for the following configurations (hint: start with creating
the cells for the outer points):

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3 Cholera Epidemic of 1853
In London in 1853 was one of the worst cholera epidemics in England’s history. The dots are
the various water pumps (where people got their water) in the Soho district in London, and the
lines are part of the Voronoi Diagram. The black bars in the map are locations of households
who died from the disease.

4 Advanced Problems
1. Suppose in Megan-ville, there are four cell towers at the four corners of the city and one
cell tower in the center of the city. The city is 5 miles long and 5 miles wide (see figure
below). When someone makes a call using a cell phone, the call is routed to the nearest
cell tower.

• Draw regions in the town so that we know which areas of the town are routed to
which cell towers.

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• If you need to be within 5 4 2 miles of a cell tower to be in range, then are there any
pockets within the town with no cell coverage?
• What is the minimum range of a cell tower needed in order to cover the whole town
in cell coverage?

2. Consider the third Burger King Problem discussed earlier. Suppose inside the figure below,
there are 6 burger kings. Where should you place the 7th Burger King so that it is the
furthest from any other Burger King?

3. A recent study showed that Voronoi diagrams are useful in studying if a tree seedling has
a good chance in surviving in a densely populated forest. Consider a Voronoi diagram in
which each point is a tree. Then the Voronoi cell corresponding to each tree is area of land
for which the tree can draw nutrients. The larger the area, the higher the chance that a
seedling in that area can draw enough nutrients to survive. Given the Voronoi diagram
below, where should we plant a tree to ensure the best chance for its survival?

Figure 1: (Left) The 6 dots are Burger kings. Where should you put a 7th one? (Right) The dots are
trees. Where should you plant a new tree?

4. For what data points are their Voronoi cells unbounded (area is infinite)?

5. For interior vertices, are there any conditions on the degree of the vertex?

6. Suppose the set of points in a Voronoi diagram is n. Prove that the maximum number of
vertices in the Voronoi graph is at most 2n − 5 (hint: Use Euler’s formula). What is the
maximum number of edges?