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Rendezvous of Mobile Agents in Directed Graphs

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Distributed Computing (DISC 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6343))

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Abstract

We study the problem of gathering at the same location two mobile agents that are dispersed in an unknown and unlabeled environment. This problem called Rendezvous, is a fundamental task in distributed coordination among autonomous entities. Most previous studies on the subject model the environment as an undirected graph and the solution techniques rely heavily on the fact that an agent can backtrack on any edge it traverses. However, such an assumption may not hold for certain scenarios, for instance a road network containing one-way streets. Thus, we consider the case of strongly connected directed graphs and present the first deterministic solution for rendezvous of two anonymous (identical) agents moving in such a digraph. Our algorithm achieves rendezvous with detection for any solvable instance of the problem, without any prior knowledge about the digraph, not even its size.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIF, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, France

    Jérémie Chalopin & Shantanu Das

  2. Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

    Peter Widmayer

Authors
  1. Jérémie Chalopin
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  2. Shantanu Das
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  3. Peter Widmayer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 02139-4307, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nancy A. Lynch

  2. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, 371 Fairfield Way, Unit 2155, 06269, Storrs, CT, USA

    Alexander A. Shvartsman

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Chalopin, J., Das, S., Widmayer, P. (2010). Rendezvous of Mobile Agents in Directed Graphs. In: Lynch, N.A., Shvartsman, A.A. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6343. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15762-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15763-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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