We study a family of line segment visibility problems, related to classical art gallery problems, which are motivated by monitoring requirements in commercial data centers. Given a collection of non-overlapping line segments in the interior of a polygon and a requirement to monitor the segments from one side or the other we examine the problem of finding a minimal guard set. We consider combinatorial bounds of problem variants where the problem solver gets to decide which side of the segments to guard, the problem poser gets to decide which side to guard, and many others. We show that virtually all variants are NP-hard to solve exactly, but also provide heuristics and experimental results using data from large commercial data centers to give insight into the associated practical problems.
By: Jonathan Lenchner, Eli Packer
Published in: RC25528 in 2015
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