Guarding curvilinear art galleries with edge or mobile guards via 2-dominance of triangulation graphs

TL;DR

This paper addresses guarding piecewise-convex polygons using edge or mobile guards by transforming the problem into 2-dominance of triangulation graphs, providing bounds, algorithms, and complexity results for guard placement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking polygon guarding to 2-dominance in triangulation graphs, with efficient algorithms and tight bounds for various polygon classes.

Findings

Bounds on guard numbers for different polygon types.

Linear and near-linear algorithms for guard set computation.

Necessary guard counts established for worst-case scenarios.

Abstract

We consider the problem of monitoring an art gallery modeled as a polygon, the edges of which are arcs of curves, with edge or mobile guards. Our focus is on piecewise-convex polygons, i.e., polygons that are locally convex, except possibly at the vertices, and their edges are convex arcs. We transform the problem of monitoring a piecewise-convex polygon to the problem of 2-dominating a properly defined triangulation graph with edges or diagonals, where 2-dominance requires that every triangle in the triangulation graph has at least two of its vertices in its 2-dominating set. We show that $\lfloor\frac{n+1}{3}\rfloor$ diagonal guards or $\lfloor\frac{2n+1}{5}\rfloor$ edge guards are always sufficient and sometimes necessary, in order to 2-dominate a triangulation graph. Furthermore, we show how to compute: a diagonal 2-dominating set of size $\lfloor\frac{n+1}{3}\rfloor$ in linear time, an edge 2-dominating set of size $\lfloor\frac{2n+1}{5}\rfloor$ in $O(n^2)$ time, and an edge 2-dominating set of size $\lfloor\frac{3n}{7}\rfloor$ in O(n) time. Based on the above-mentioned results, we prove that, for piecewise-convex polygons, we can compute: a mobile guard set of size $\lfloor\frac{n+1}{3}\rfloor$ in $O(n\log{}n)$ time, an edge guard set of size $\lfloor\frac{2n+1}{5}\rfloor$ in $O(n^2)$ time, and an edge guard set of size $\lfloor\frac{3n}{7}\rfloor$ in $O(n\log{}n)$ time. Finally, we show that $\lfloor\frac{n}{3}\rfloor$ mobile or $\lceil\frac{n}{3}\rceil$ edge guards are sometimes necessary. When restricting our attention to monotone piecewise-convex polygons, the bounds mentioned above drop: $\lceil\frac{n+1}{4}\rceil$ edge or mobile guards are always sufficient and sometimes necessary; such an edge or mobile guard set, of size at most $\lceil\frac{n+1}{4}\rceil$, can be computed in O(n) time.