The Searchlight Scheduling Problem

The Searchlight Scheduling Problem

The problem of searching for a mobile robber in a simple polygon by a number of searchlights is considered. A searchlight is a stationary point which emits a single ray that cannot penetrate the boundary of the polygon. The direction of the ray can be changed continuously, and a point is detected by a searchlight at a given time if and only if it is on the ray. A robber is a point that can move...

The 3-dimensional searchlight scheduling problem

The problem of searching for a mobile intruder in a polygonal region by a set of stationary guards, each carrying an orientable laser, is known in the literature as the Searchlight Scheduling Problem. A long-standing conjecture concerns the NP-hardness of deciding if a given polygon is searchable by a given set of guards. In this paper we introduce the more general problem of detecting an intru...

A Complete Algorithm for Searchlight Scheduling

This article develops an algorithm for a group of guards statically positioned in a nonconvex polygonal environment with holes. Each guard possesses a single searchlight, a ray sensor which can rotate about the guard’s position but cannot penetrate the boundary of the environment. A point is detected by a searchlight if and only if the point is on the ray at some instant. Targets are points whi...

The searchlight problem for road networks

Partial Searchlight Scheduling is Strongly PSPACE-complete

The problem of searching a polygonal region for an unpredictably moving intruder by a set of stationary guards, each carrying an orientable laser, is known as the Searchlight Scheduling Problem. Determining the computational complexity of deciding if the polygon can be searched by a given set of guards is a long-standing open problem. Here we propose a generalization called the Partial Searchli...