Minimum Vertex Guard problem for orthogonal polygons: a genetic approach

Abstract

The problem of minimizing the number of guards placed on vertices needed to guard a given simple polygon (MINIMUM VERTEX GUARD problem) is NP-hard. This computational complexity opens two lines of investigation: the development of algorithms that determine approximate solutions and the determination of optimal solutions for special classes of simple polygons. In this paper we follow the first line of investigation proposing an approximation algorithm based on the general met heuristic Genetic Algorithms to solve the MINIMUM VERTEXGUARD problem