Metaheuristic Approaches for the Minimum Vertex Guard Problem

We address the problem of stationing guards in vertices of a simple polygon in such a way that the whole polygon is guarded and the number of guards is minimum. This problem is NP-hard with relevant practical applications. In this paper we propose three metaheuristic approaches to this problem. Combined with the genetic algorithms strategy, which was proposed in [4], these four approximation algorithms have been implemented and compared. The experimental evaluation from the hybrid strategy shows significant improvement in the number of guards compared to theoretical bounds.