An extremal property of the eigenvalue of irreducible matrices in idempotent algebra and solution of the Rawls location problem

An extremal property of the eigenvalue of an irreducible matrix in idempotent algebra is studied. It is shown that this value is the minimum value of some functional defined using this matrix on the set of vectors with nonzero components. The minimax problem of location of a single facility (the Rawls problem) on a plane with rectilinear distance is considered. For this problem, we give the corresponding representation in terms of idempotent algebra and suggest a new algebraic solution, which is based on the results of investigation of the extremal property of eigenvalue and reduces to finding the eigenvalue and eigenvectors of a certain matrix.