Finding Your Kids When They Are Lost

If two searchers are searching for a stationary target and wish to minimize the expected time until both searchers and the lost target are reunited, there is a trade off between searching for the target and checking back to see if the other searcher has already found the target. This note solves a non-linear optimization problem to find the optimal search strategy for this problem.

[1]  Richard Weber,et al.  The rendezvous problem on discrete locations , 1990, Journal of Applied Probability.