Motion planning in polyhedral products of groups and a Fadell-Husseini approach to topological complexity (Q6044498)

The notion of monoidal topological complexity (TC) was introduced by \textit{N. Iwase} and \textit{M. Sakai} in [Topology Appl. 157, No. 1, 10--21 (2010; Zbl 1192.55002)] as a variation of Farber's concept of TC by demanding that every local domain of a continuous motion planner contains the diagonal of the space and that the motion planner associates with each element of the diagonal the respective constant path. \textit{A. Dranishnikov} has introduced a slightly different version of monoidal TC in [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 142, No. 12, 4365--4376 (2014; Zbl 1305.55003)] by dropping the requirement that each of the local domains contains the whole diagonal. In the present article, the authors present another verion of monoidal TC, which is close in spirit to the definition of relative Lusternik-Schnirelmann (LS) category by \textit{E. Fadell} and \textit{S. Y. Husseini} in [Rend. Semin. Mat. Fis. Milano 64, 99--115 (1996; Zbl 0860.55011)]. Namely, in addition to demanding that motion planners associate constant paths with points in the diagonal, the authors demand that exactly one of the local motion planning domains contains the diagonal while all of the other domains are disjoint from the diagonal. They prove by elementary and explicit methods that for absolute neighborhood retracts, their definition as well as those of Iwase-Sakai and Dranishnikov all coincide. As an application of their definition of monoidal TC, the authors compute the TC of certain polyhedral products of locally compact connected CW groups under a certain condition on their LS categories.