Network Decontamination

The Network Decontamination problem consists in coordinating a team of mobile agents in order to clean a contaminated network. The problem is actually equivalent to tracking and capturing an invisible and arbitrarily fast fugitive. This problem has natural applications in network security in computer science or in robotics for search or pursuit-evasion missions. In this Chapter, we focus on networks modeled by graphs. Many different objectives have been studied in this context, the main one being the minimization of the number of mobile agents necessary to clean a contaminated network. Another important aspect is that this optimization problem has a deep graph-theoretical interpretation. Network decontamination and, more precisely, graph searching models, provide nice algorithmic interpretations of fundamental concepts in the Graph Minors theory by Robertson and Seymour. For all these reasons, graph searching variants have been widely studied since their introduction by Breish (1967) and mathematical formaliza-tions by Parsons (1978) and Petrov (1982). This chapter consists of an overview of algorithmic results on graph de-contamination and graph searching