The lifting model for reconfiguration

Abstract

Given a pair of start and target configurations, each consisting of n pairwise disjoint disks in the plane, what is the minimum number of moves that suffice for transforming the start configuration into the target configuration? In one move a disk is lifted from the plane and placed back in the plane at another location, without intersecting any other disk. We discuss efficient algorithms for this task and estimate their number of moves under different assumptions on disk radii. We then extend our results for arbitrary disks to systems of pseudodisks, in particular to sets of homothetic copies of a convex object.