Network Decontamination

Description

The Network Decontamination problem consists of coordinating a team of mobile agents in order to clean a contaminated network. The problem is actually equivalent to tracking and capturing an invisible and arbitrarily fast fugitive. This problem has natural applications in network security in computer science or in robotics for search or pursuit-evasion missions. Many different objectives have been studied: the main one being the minimization of the number of mobile agents necessary to clean a contaminated network. Many environments (continuous or discrete) have also been considered. In this Chapter, we focus on networks modeled by graphs. In this context , the optimization problem that consists of minimizing the number of agents has a deep graph-theoretical interpretation. Network decon-tamination and, more precisely, graph searching models, provide nice al-gorithmic interpretations of fundamental concepts in the Graph Minors theory by Robertson and Seymour. For all these reasons, graph searching variants have been widely studied since their introduction by Breish (1967) and mathematical formaliza-tions by Parsons (1978) and Petrov (1982). This chapter consists of an overview of the algorithmic results on graph decontamination and graph searching.

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