Title: Patrolling on Dynamic Ring Networks
Time: 15:50
Location: Acadia Lab, Building Zeta
Type: Research talk
Speaker: Shantanu Das
Abstract:
We study the problem of patrolling the nodes of a network collaboratively by a team of mobile agents, such that each node of the network is visited by at least one agent once in every I(n) time units, with the objective of minimizing the idle time I(n). While patrolling has been studied previously for static networks, we investigate the problem on dynamic networks with a fixed set of nodes, but dynamic edges. In particular, we consider 1-interval-connected ring networks and provide various patrolling algorithms for such networks, for k = 2 or k > 2 agents. We also show almost matching lower bounds that hold even for the best starting configurations. Thus, our algorithms achieve close to optimal idle time. Further, we show a clear separation in terms of idle time, for agents that have prior knowledge of the dynamic networks compared to agents that do not have such knowledge. This paper provides the first known results for collaborative patrolling on dynamic graphs.
Tag Archives: Graph Theory
19/09/2019 – Talk by Euripdes Markou
Title: Exploring Graphs with Time Constraints by Unreliable Collections of Mobile Robots
Time: 15:15
Location: Acadia Lab, Building Zeta
Type: Research talk
Speaker: Euripdes Markou
Abstract:
A graph environment must be explored by a collection of mobile robots. Some of the robots, a priori unknown, may turn out to be unreliable. The graph is weighted and each node is assigned a deadline. The exploration is successful if each node of the graph is visited before its deadline by a reliable robot. The edge weight corresponds to the time needed by a robot to traverse the edge. Given the number of robots which may crash, is it possible to design an algorithm, which will always guarantee the exploration, independently of the choice of the subset of unreliable robots by the adversary? We find the optimal time, during which the graph may be explored. Our approach permits to find the maximal number of robots, which may turn out to be unreliable, and the graph is still guaranteed to be explored.
We concentrate on line graphs and rings, for which we give positive results. We start with the case of the collections involving only reliable robots. We give algorithms finding optimal times needed for exploration when the robots are assigned to fixed initial positions as well as when such starting positions may be determined by the algorithm. We extend our consideration to the case when some number of robots may be unreliable. Our most surprising result is that solving the line exploration problem with robots at given positions, which may involve crash-faulty ones, is NP-hard. The same problem has polynomial solutions for a ring and for the case when the initial robots’ positions on the line are arbitrary. The exploration problem is shown to be NP-hard for star graphs, even when the team consists of only two reliable robots.
