A fire fighter's problem

DOI10.4230/LIPICS.SOCG.2015.768MaRDI QIDQ5368727zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Rolf Klein, Elmar Langetepe, Christos Levcopoulos

Publication date 10 October 2017

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6065

zbMATH Keywords

dynamic environmentslower and upper boundsmotion planningspiralling strategies

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects) (68U05)

Abstract: Suppose that a circular fire spreads in the plane at unit speed. A single fire fighter can build a barrier at speed $v>1$. How large must $v$ be to ensure that the fire can be contained, and how should the fire fighter proceed? We contribute two results. First, we analyze the natural curve $mbox{FF}_v$ that develops when the fighter keeps building, at speed $v$, a barrier along the boundary of the expanding fire. We prove that the behavior of this spiralling curve is governed by a complex function $(e^{wZ}-s,Z{)}^{-1}$, where $w$ and $s$ are real functions of $v$. For $v>v_c=2.6144ldots$ all zeroes are complex conjugate pairs. If $phi$ denotes the complex argument of the conjugate pair nearest to the origin then, by residue calculus, the fire fighter needs $Theta(1/phi)$ rounds before the fire is contained. As $v$ decreases towards $v_c$ these two zeroes merge into a real one, so that argument $phi$ goes to~0. Thus, curve $mbox{FF}_v$ does not contain the fire if the fighter moves at speed $v=v_c$. (That speed $v>v_c$ is sufficient for containing the fire has been proposed before by Bressan et al. [7], who constructed a sequence of logarithmic spiral segments that stay strictly away from the fire.) Second, we show that any curve that visits the four coordinate half-axes in cyclic order, and in inreasing distances from the origin, needs speed $v>1.618ldots$, the golden ratio, in order to contain the fire. Keywords: Motion Planning, Dynamic Environments, Spiralling strategies, Lower and upper bounds

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