Rendezvous of Heterogeneous Mobile Agents in Edge-weighted Networks

TL;DR

This paper studies the rendezvous problem for heterogeneous agents in graphs, showing how communication and assumptions about traversal times can significantly reduce the time needed for agents to meet.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for heterogeneous rendezvous, analyzes the impact of communication and traversal time assumptions on rendezvous time complexity.

Findings

Rendezvous can be achieved in O(n T_{OPT}) time without additional assumptions.

Communication of Θ(n) bits reduces rendezvous time to Θ(T_{OPT}).

Certain assumptions about traversal times decrease both rendezvous time and communication complexity.

Abstract

We introduce a variant of the deterministic rendezvous problem for a pair of heterogeneous agents operating in an undirected graph, which differ in the time they require to traverse particular edges of the graph. Each agent knows the complete topology of the graph and the initial positions of both agents. The agent also knows its own traversal times for all of the edges of the graph, but is unaware of the corresponding traversal times for the other agent. The goal of the agents is to meet on an edge or a node of the graph. In this scenario, we study the time required by the agents to meet, compared to the meeting time $T_{OPT}$ in the offline scenario in which the agents have complete knowledge about each others speed characteristics. When no additional assumptions are made, we show that rendezvous in our model can be achieved after time $O(n T_{OPT})$ in a $n$-node graph, and that such time is essentially in some cases the best possible. However, we prove that the rendezvous time can be reduced to $\Theta (T_{OPT})$ when the agents are allowed to exchange $\Theta(n)$ bits of information at the start of the rendezvous process. We then show that under some natural assumption about the traversal times of edges, the hardness of the heterogeneous rendezvous problem can be substantially decreased, both in terms of time required for rendezvous without communication, and the communication complexity of achieving rendezvous in time $\Theta (T_{OPT})$.