3/2 Firefighters are not enough

The firefighter problem is a monotone dynamic process in graphs that can be viewed as modeling the use of a limited supply of vaccinations to stop the spread of an epidemic. In more detail, a fire spreads through a graph, from burning vertices to their unprotected neighbors. In every round, a small amount of unburnt vertices can be protected by firefighters. How many firefighters per turn, on average, are needed to stop the fire from advancing? We prove tight lower and upper bounds on the amount of firefighters needed to control a fire in the Cartesian planar grid and in the strong planar grid, resolving two conjectures of Ng and Raff.Comment: 8 page

The Firefighter Problem: A Structural Analysis

We consider the complexity of the firefighter problem where b>=1 firefighters are available at each time step. This problem is proved NP-complete even on trees of degree at most three and budget one (Finbow et al.,2007) and on trees of bounded degree b+3 for any fixed budget b>=2 (Bazgan et al.,2012). In this paper, we provide further insight into the complexity landscape of the problem by showing that the pathwidth and the maximum degree of the input graph govern its complexity. More precisely, we first prove that the problem is NP-complete even on trees of pathwidth at most three for any fixed budget b>=1. We then show that the problem turns out to be fixed parameter-tractable with respect to the combined parameter "pathwidth" and "maximum degree" of the input graph

A Fire Fighter's Problem

Suppose that a circular fire spreads in the plane at unit speed. A single fire fighter can build a barrier at speed $v>1$. How large must $v$ be to ensure that the fire can be contained, and how should the fire fighter proceed? We contribute two results. First, we analyze the natural curve \mbox{FF}_v that develops when the fighter keeps building, at speed $v$, a barrier along the boundary of the expanding fire. We prove that the behavior of this spiralling curve is governed by a complex function $(e^{w Z} - s \, Z)^{-1}$, where $w$ and $s$ are real functions of $v$. For $v>v_c=2.6144 \ldots$ all zeroes are complex conjugate pairs. If $\phi$ denotes the complex argument of the conjugate pair nearest to the origin then, by residue calculus, the fire fighter needs $\Theta( 1/\phi)$ rounds before the fire is contained. As $v$ decreases towards $v_c$ these two zeroes merge into a real one, so that argument $\phi$ goes to~0. Thus, curve \mbox{FF}_v does not contain the fire if the fighter moves at speed $v=v_c$. (That speed $v>v_c$ is sufficient for containing the fire has been proposed before by Bressan et al. [7], who constructed a sequence of logarithmic spiral segments that stay strictly away from the fire.) Second, we show that any curve that visits the four coordinate half-axes in cyclic order, and in inreasing distances from the origin, needs speed $v>1.618\ldots$, the golden ratio, in order to contain the fire. Keywords: Motion Planning, Dynamic Environments, Spiralling strategies, Lower and upper boundsComment: A preliminary version of the paper was presented at SoCG 201