Evacuation of equilateral triangles by mobile agents of limited communication range
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We consider the problem of evacuating k ≥ 2 mobile agents from a unit-sided equilateral triangle through an exit located at an unknown location on the perimeter of the triangle. The agents are initially located at the centroid of the triangle and they can communicate with other agents at distance at most r with 0≤ r ≤ 1. An agent can move at speed at most one, and finds the exit only when it reaches the point where the exit is located. The agents can collaborate in the search for the exit. The goal of the evacuation problem is to minimize the evacuation time, defined as the worst-case time for all the agents to reach the exit. We propose and analyze several algorithms for the problem of evacuation by k ≥ 2 agents; our results indicate that the best strategy to be used varies depending on the values of r and k. For two agents, we give three algorithms, each of which achieves the best performance for different sub-ranges of r in the range 0 ≤ r ≤ 1. Finally, we show that for any r, evacuation of k=6 +2(1/r-1) agents can be done in time 1+√(3)/3, which is optimal in terms of time, and asymptotically optimal in terms of the number of agents.
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