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Further connections between contract-scheduling and ray-searching problems

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Abstract

This paper addresses two classes of different, yet interrelated optimization problems. The first class of problems involves a mobile searcher that must locate a hidden target in an environment that consists of a set of unbounded, concurrent rays. The second class pertains to the design of interruptible algorithms by means of a schedule of contract algorithms. Both types of problems capture fundamental aspects of resource allocation under uncertainty. We study several variants of these families of problems, such as searching and scheduling with probabilistic considerations, redundancy and fault-tolerance issues, randomized strategies, and trade-offs between performance and preemptions. For many of these problems, we present the first known results that apply to multi-ray and multi-problem domains. Our objective is to demonstrate that several well-motivated settings can be addressed using the same underlying approach.

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Notes

  1. We will often use X to denote a search strategy and a contract schedule, since the search and contract lengths \(x_i\) are the unknowns in the corresponding optimization problems.

  2. Following Demaine et al. (2006); Angelopoulos et al. (2017), we only count as “turn” every change of direction that occurs on a point other than the origin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6, LIP6, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Paris, France

    Spyros Angelopoulos

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  1. Spyros Angelopoulos
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Correspondence to Spyros Angelopoulos.

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A preliminary version of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2015 Angelopoulos (2015).

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Angelopoulos, S. Further connections between contract-scheduling and ray-searching problems. J Sched 25, 139–155 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-021-00712-8

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