Collision-free Exploration by Mobile Agents Using Pebbles

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to enable multiple mobile agents to explore a graph without collisions using pebbles of different colors placed by an Oracle, focusing on minimizing the number of colors needed for collision-free exploration.

Contribution

The paper introduces algorithms for collision-free graph exploration with pebbles, establishing that at least three colors are needed in general and providing a polynomial solution for bipartite graphs with two colors.

Findings

Impossible with 1 color for general graphs.

Proposed an exploration algorithm with 3 colors.

Polynomial algorithm for bipartite graphs with 2 colors.

Abstract

In this paper, we study collision-free graph exploration in an anonymous pot labeled network. Two identical mobile agents, starting from different nodes in $G$ have to explore the nodes of $G$ in such a way that for every node $v$ in $G$, at least one mobile agent visits $v$ and no two agents are in the same node in any round and stop. The agents know the size of the graph but do not know its topology. If an agent arrives in the one-hop neighborhood of the other agent, both agents can detect the presence of the other agent but have no idea at which neighboring node the other agent resides. The agents may wake up in different rounds An agent, after waking up, has no knowledge about the wake-up time of the other agent. We study the problem of collision-free exploration where some pebbles are placed by an Oracle at the nodes of the graph to assist the agents in achieving collision-free exploration. The Oracle knows the graph, the starting positions of the agents, and their wake-up schedule, and it places some pebbles that may be of different colors, at most one at each node. The number of different colors of the pebbles placed by the Oracle is called the {\it color index} of the corresponding pebble placement algorithm. The central question we study is as follows: "What is the minimum number $z$ such that there exists a collision-free exploration of a given graph with pebble placement of color index $z$?" For general graphs, we show that it is impossible to design an algorithm that achieves collision-free exploration with color index 1. We propose an exploration algorithm with color index 3. We also proposed a polynomial exploration algorithm for bipartite graphs with color index 2.