Applying Tabu Search to the Freeze-Tag Problem

The Freeze-Tag Problem is a problem in swarm robotics. The problem goes as this: there are n robots; Of these, n-1 ones are “asleep” or in “standby mode” in the beginning of the problem and only one robot is "awake". Only awake robots can move and the asleep ones are stationary. Once an awake robot touches an asleep robot by going to its exact place, the asleep robot awakens and becomes able to move and awaken the other robots. The objective is to minimize the required time to wake up the robots, and to solve the problem in a reasonable time. The method presented in this paper is a Tabu Search approximation algorithm that improves the existing solutions and its runtime is short.