On the fast searching problem

Abstract

Edge searching is a graph problem that corresponds to cleaning a contaminated graph using the minimum number of searchers. We define fast searching as a variant of this widely studied problem. Fast searching corresponds to an internal monotone search in which every edge is traversed exactly once and searchers are not allowed to jump. We present a linear time algorithm to compute the fast search number of trees. We investigate the fast search number of bipartite graphs. We also propose a general cost function for evaluating search strategies that utilizes both edge searching and fast searching. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.