An efficient solution to the corridor search problem

Abstract

The corridor search problem is the problem of searching for a mobile intruder in the corridor, which is a polygonal region P with an entrance u and an exit r. by the mobile searcher having flashlights whose visibility is limited to the rays emanating from his position. In this paper, we relate the corridor search problem to the well studied two- guard problem, which gives us efficient solutions for several versions of the corridor search problem. Specially, we can decide whether there exists a schedule for the searcher having two flashlights to detect the intruder in O(rclogrc) time, and if so generate such a schedule in 0(rclogrc + k) time, where k (< n2) is the minimum number of search instructions. Our results improve upon the previous time bounds 0(n2) and 0(rc2logrc), respectively.