Locating a Central Hunter on the Plane

Protection, surveillance or other types of coverage services of mobile points call for different, asymmetric distance measures than the traditional Euclidean, rectangular or other norms used for fixed points. In this paper, the destinations are mobile points (prey) moving at fixed speeds and directions and the facility (hunter) can capture them using one of two possible strategies: either it is smart, predicting the prey’s movement in order to minimize the time needed to capture it, or it is dumb, following a pursuit curve, by moving at any moment in the direction of the prey. In either case, the hunter location in a plane is sought in order to minimize the maximum time of capture of any prey. An efficient solution algorithm is developed that uses the particular geometry that both versions of this problem possess. In the case of unpredictable movement of prey, a worst-case type solution is proposed, which reduces to the well-known weighted Euclidean minimax location problem. The work of the second and third authors was supported in part by a grant from Research Projects BFM2003-04062 and MTM2006-15054.