Further Connections Between Contract-Scheduling and Ray-Searching Problems

TL;DR

This paper explores the connections between contract-scheduling and ray-searching problems, addressing various variants with probabilistic, redundancy, and randomized strategies, providing new results for complex multi-ray and multi-problem scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a unified approach to solve diverse variants of contract-scheduling and ray-searching problems, including probabilistic and fault-tolerant cases, with novel results for multi-ray domains.

Findings

First known results for multi-ray and multi-problem variants.

Unified approach applicable to different problem settings.

Effective strategies for probabilistic and fault-tolerant scenarios.

Abstract

This paper addresses two classes of different, yet interrelated optimization problems. The first class of problems involves a robot that must locate a hidden target in an environment that consists of a set of concurrent rays. The second class pertains to the design of interruptible algorithms by means of a schedule of contract algorithms. We study several variants of these families of problems, such as searching and scheduling with probabilistic considerations, redundancy and fault-tolerance issues, randomized strategies, and trade-offs between performance and preemptions. For many of these problems we present the first known results that apply to multi-ray and multi-problem domains. Our objective is to demonstrate that several well-motivated settings can be addressed using the same underlying approach.