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In this paper, we consider the problem of planning a path for a robot to monitor a known set of features of interest in an environment. We represent the environment as a graph with vertex weights and edge lengths. The vertices represent regions of interest, edge lengths give travel times between regions, and the vertex weights give the importance of each region. As the robot repeatedly performs a closed walk on the graph, we define the weighted latency of a vertex to be the maximum time between visits to that vertex, weighted by the importance (vertex weight) of that vertex. Our goal is to find a closed walk that minimizes the maximum weighted latency of any vertex. We show that there does not exist a polynomial time algorithm for the problem. We then provide two approximation algorithms; an O(log n)-approximation algorithm and an O(log ρ G )-approximation algorithm, where ρ G is the ratio between the maximum and minimum vertex weights. We provide simulation results which demonstrate that our algorithms can be applied to problems consisting of thousands of vertices, and a case study for patrolling a city for crime.

We consider an assortment optimization problem where a customer chooses a single item from a sequence of sets shown to her, while limited inventories constrain the items offered to customers over time. In the special case where all of the assortments have size one, our problem captures the online stochastic matching with timeouts problem. For this problem, we derive a polynomial-time approximation algorithm which earns at least 1-ln(2-1/e), or 0.51, of the optimum. This improves upon the previous-best approximation ratio of 0.46, and furthermore, we show that it is tight. For the general assortment problem, we establish the first constant-factor approximation ratio of 0.09 for the case that different types of customers value items differently, and an approximation ratio of 0.15 for the case that different customers value each item the same. Our algorithms are based on rounding an LP relaxation for multi-stage assortment optimization, and improve upon previous randomized rounding schemes to derive the tight ratio of 1-ln(2-1/e).

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for finding near optimal dominating sets on grids. The basis for this algorithm is an existing centralized algorithm that constructs dominating sets on grids. The size of the dominating set provided by this centralized algorithm is upper-bounded by (m+2)(n+2) 5for m × n grids and its difference from the optimal domination number of the grid is upper-bounded by five. Both the centralized and distributed algorithms are generalized for the k-distance dominating set problem, where all grid vertices are within distance k of the vertices in the dominating set.

In this paper, we consider the problem of planning a path for a robot to monitor a known set of features of interest in an environment. We represent the environment as a vertex-and edge-weighted graph, where vertices represent features or regions of interest. The edge weights give travel times between regions, and the vertex weights give the importance of each region. If the robot repeatedly performs a closed walk on the graph, then we can define the latency of a vertex to be the maximum time between visits to that vertex, weighted by the importance (vertex weight) of that vertex. Our goal in this paper is to find the closed walk that minimizes the maximum weighted latency of any vertex. We show that there does not always exist an optimal walk of polynomial size. We then prove that for any graph there exist a constant approximation walk of size O(n 2 ), where n is the number of vertices. We provide two approximation algorithms; an O(log n)-approximation and an O(log ρ)-approximation, where ρ is the ratio between the maximum and minimum vertex weight. We provide simulation results which demonstrate that our algorithms can be applied to problems consisting of thousands of vertices.