A Fire Fighter's Problem.

Rolf Klein, Elmar Langetepe, Christos Levcopoulos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPaper in conference proceedingpeer-review

Abstract

Suppose that a circular fire spreads in the plane at unit speed. A 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 provide two results. First, we analyze the natural strategy where the fighter keeps building a barrier along the frontier of the expanding fire. We prove that this approach contains the fire if v > v_c = 2.6144... holds. Second, we show that any "spiralling" strategy must have speed v > 1.618, the golden ratio, in order to succeed.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLeibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
EditorsLars Arge, Janos Pach
PublisherSchloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
Pages768-780
Number of pages13
Volume34
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Event31st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2015) - Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Netherlands
Duration: 2015 Jun 22 → …

Publication series

Name
Volume34
ISSN (Print)1868-8969

Conference

Conference31st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2015)
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
Period2015/06/22 → …

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Computer Sciences

Free keywords

  • Motion Planning
  • Dynamic Environments
  • Spiralling strategies
  • Lower and upper bounds

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