A graph environment must be explored by a collection of mobile robots. Some
of the robots, a priori unknown, may turn out to be unreliable. The graph is
weighted and each node is assigned a deadline. The exploration is successful if
each node of the graph is visited before its deadline by a reliable robot. The
edge weight corresponds to the time needed by a robot to traverse the edge.
Given the number of robots which may crash, is it possible to design an
algorithm, which will always guarantee the exploration, independently of the
choice of the subset of unreliable robots by the adversary? We find the optimal
time, during which the graph may be explored. Our approach permits to find the
maximal number of robots, which may turn out to be unreliable, and the graph is
still guaranteed to be explored.
We concentrate on line graphs and rings, for which we give positive results.
We start with the case of the collections involving only reliable robots. We
give algorithms finding optimal times needed for exploration when the robots
are assigned to fixed initial positions as well as when such starting positions
may be determined by the algorithm. We extend our consideration to the case
when some number of robots may be unreliable. Our most surprising result is
that solving the line exploration problem with robots at given positions, which
may involve crash-faulty ones, is NP-hard. The same problem has polynomial
solutions for a ring and for the case when the initial robots' positions on the
line are arbitrary.
The exploration problem is shown to be NP-hard for star graphs, even when the
team consists of only two reliable robots