The Gravitational Strategy for the Timed Patrolling

A great number of techniques were already applied to the non-adversarial variation of the multiagent patrolling problem. Experiments suggest that, for general graphs, all those approaches are inferior to a strategy based on the travelling salesman problem (TSP), in which agents are distributed equidistantly along the TSP-cycle. This approach, however, is neither optimal nor scalable. In this article, we present a novel patrolling strategy which tries to overcome these limitations. Inspired on Newton's law of gravitation, our approach consists in assigning to each node of the graph an abstract mass which grows while the node remains unvisited, creating a force that attracts agents to it. We defined some variations of our approach and experimentally compared them to the TSP-based strategy, concluding that our approach performs better in general.