Minimum Covering with Travel Cost

TL;DR

This paper studies the computational complexity of the MWPDV problem, showing NP-hardness and proposing approximation algorithms for various special cases involving polygons and scan ranges.

Contribution

It establishes NP-hardness for MWPDV even in simple cases and introduces approximation algorithms with proven bounds for specific polygon and scan range scenarios.

Findings

NP-hardness proven for rectilinear polygons with L_infinity range 1

2.5-approximation algorithm for rectilinear MWPDV milling in grid polygons

4-approximation bicriteria algorithm for grid polygons with circular scan range

Abstract

Given a polygon and a visibility range, the Myopic Watchman Problem with Discrete Vision (MWPDV) asks for a closed path P and a set of scan points S, such that (i) every point of the polygon is within visibility range of a scan point; and (ii) path length plus weighted sum of scan number along the tour is minimized. Alternatively, the bicriteria problem (ii') aims at minimizing both scan number and tour length. We consider both lawn mowing (in which tour and scan points may leave P) and milling (in which tour, scan points and visibility must stay within P) variants for the MWPDV; even for simple special cases, these problems are NP-hard. We show that this problem is NP-hard, even for the special cases of rectilinear polygons and L_\infty scan range 1, and negligible small travel cost or negligible travel cost. For rectilinear MWPDV milling in grid polygons we present a 2.5-approximation with unit scan range; this holds for the bicriteria version, thus for any linear combination of travel cost and scan cost. For grid polygons and circular unit scan range, we describe a bicriteria 4-approximation. These results serve as stepping stones for the general case of circular scans with scan radius r and arbitrary polygons of feature size a, for which we extend the underlying ideas to a pi(r/a}+(r+1)/2) bicriteria approximation algorithm. Finally, we describe approximation schemes for MWPDV lawn mowing and milling of grid polygons, for fixed ratio between scan cost and travel cost.