Consider k robots initially located at the centroid of an equilateral triangle T of sides of length one. The goal of the robots is to evacuate T through an exit at an unknown location on the boundary of T. Each robot can move anywhere in T independently of other robots with maximum speed one. The objective is to minimize the evacuation time, which is defined as the time required for all k robots to reach the exit. We consider the face-to-face communication model for the robots: a robot can communicate with another robot only when they meet in T. In this paper, we give upper and lower bounds for the face-to-face evacuation time by k robots. We show that for any k, any algorithm for evacuating k >= 1 robots from T requires at least sqrt(3) time. This bound is asymptotically optimal, as we show that a straightforward strategy of evacuation by k robots gives an upper bound of sqrt(3) + 3/k. For k = 3, 4, 5, 6, we show significant improvements on the obvious upper bound by giving algorithms with evacuation times of 2.0887, 1.9816, 1.876, and 1.827, respectively. For k = 2 robots, we give a lower bound of 1 + 2/sqrt(3) ~= 2.154, and an algorithm with upper bound of 2.3367 on the evacuation time.
@InProceedings{chuangpishit_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2017.11, author = {Chuangpishit, Huda and Mehrabi, Saeed and Narayanan, Lata and Opatrny, Jaroslav}, title = {{Evacuating an Equilateral Triangle in the Face-to-Face Model}}, booktitle = {21st International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2017)}, pages = {11:1--11:16}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-061-3}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2018}, volume = {95}, editor = {Aspnes, James and Bessani, Alysson and Felber, Pascal and Leit\~{a}o, Jo\~{a}o}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2017.11}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-86310}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2017.11}, annote = {Keywords: Distributed algorithms, Robots evacuation, Face-to-face communication, Equilateral triangle} }
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