In the metric multi-cover problem (MMC), we are given two point sets $Y$ (servers) and $X$ (clients) in an arbitrary metric space $(X cup Y, d)$, a positive integer $k$ that represents the coverage demand of each client, and a constant $alpha geq 1$. Each server can have a single ball of arbitrary radius centered on it. Each client $x in X$ needs to be covered by at least $k$ such balls centered on servers. The objective function that we wish to minimize is the sum of the $alpha$-th powers of the radii of the balls. In this article, we consider the MMC problem as well as some non-trivial generalizations, such as (a) the non-uniform MMC, where we allow client-specific demands, and (b) the $t$-MMC, where we require the number of open servers to be at most some given integer $t$. For each of these problems, we present an efficient algorithm that reduces the problem to several instances of the corresponding $1$-covering problem, where the coverage demand of each client is $1$. Our reductions preserve optimality up to a multiplicative constant factor. Applying known constant factor approximation algorithms for $1$-covering, we obtain the first constant approximations for the MMC and these generalizations.
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