DISC 2011 invited lecture: Deterministic rendezvous in networks: Survey of models and results

Abstract

Two or more mobile entities, called agents or robots, starting at distinct initial positions in some environment, have to meet. This task is known in the literature as rendezvous. Among many alternative assumptions that have been used to study the rendezvous problem, two most significantly influence the methodology appropriate for its solution. The first of these assumptions concerns the environment in which the mobile entities navigate: it can be either a terrain in the plane, or a network modeled as an undirected graph. In the case of networks, methods and results further depend on whether the agents have the ability to mark nodes in some way. The second assumption concerns the way in which the entities move: it can be either deterministic or randomized. In this paper we survey models and results concerning deterministic rendezvous in networks, where agents cannot mark nodes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.