A theoretical analysis of multi-agent patrolling strategies

A group of agents can be used to perform patrolling tasks in a variety of domains ranging from computer network administration to computer wargame simulations. The quality of the strategies used for patrolling may be evaluated using different measures. Informally, a good strategy is one that minimizes the time lag between two passages to the same place and for all places. Recently, many different architectures of multi-agent systems have been proposed and evaluated on the patrolling problem [1]. In particular, different types of agents (reactive vs. cognitive), agent communication (allowed vs. forbidden), coordination scheme (central and explicit vs. emergent), agent perception (local vs. global), and decisionmaking mechanism (random selection vs. goal-oriented selection) were proposed. This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of the patrolling problem addressing the following issues : Are there efficient algorithms generating near-optimal strategies ? Are patrolling strategies based on partitioning the territory good?