Minimizing the average searching time for an object within a graph

Ron Teller (), Moshe Zofi () and Moshe Kaspi ()
Additional contact information
Ron Teller: Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Moshe Zofi: Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Moshe Kaspi: Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Computational Optimization and Applications, 2019, vol. 74, issue 2, No 6, 517-545

Abstract: Abstract This paper presents a new graph search problem for which a searcher wishes to find an object that may be found at a set of locations. The searcher doesn’t know the object’s exact location, but does know the a-prior probability of finding the object at each location. He wishes to build a searching path for reaching the object that starts from a given location and ends when reaching the object (or after searching the entire set with a false result). The objective is to find a searching path which will minimize the average searching time. We consider two scenarios for this problem: one when there is an unknown number of objects on the set and another when there is exactly one object on the set (the sum of probabilities is equal to 1). We show that this problem is NP-Hard, and supply a branch and bound algorithm for finding an optimal solution for large scale problems. We also study greedy approaches and other heuristics and compare the performance of these algorithms in various situations.

Keywords: Graph search algorithms; Object searching; Branch and bound; Dynamic programming; Greedy algorithm; Heuristic search; TSP; Ant colony optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10589-019-00121-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:coopap:v:74:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10589-019-00121-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/math/journal/10589

DOI: 10.1007/s10589-019-00121-w

Access Statistics for this article

Computational Optimization and Applications is currently edited by William W. Hager

More articles in Computational Optimization and Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().