"Long-term planning versus short-term planning in the asymptotical location 
problem"

We present a class of problems that go under the name of location problems where 
one has to determine the optimal position of a given number of points in a given 
domain. Due to the numerical complexity of this kind of problems, the asymptotic 
analysis as the number of points go to infinity is studied. The analogous cases 
where one has to design an optimal network, called irrigation problems, are also 
of interest. We show that a short-term local (in time) optimization gives in 
these cases a result not so far from the long-term global optimization one, 
being much easier to implement.