GUARD PLACEMENT FOR MAXIMIZING L-VISIBILITY EXTERIOR TO A CONVEX POLYGON

Abstract

Two points a and b are said to be L-visible among a set of polygonal obstacles if the length of the shortest path from a to b avoiding these obstacles is no more than L. For a given convex polygon P with n vertices, Gewali et al.1 addressed the guard placement problem on the boundary of P that covers the maximum area outside to the polygon under L-visibility with P as obstacle. Their proposed algorithm runs in O(n) time if [Formula: see text], where π(P) denotes the perimeter of P. They conjectured that if [Formula: see text], then the problem can be solved in subquadratic time. In this paper, we settle the conjecture in the affirmative sense, by proposing an easy to implement linear time algorithm for any arbitrary value of L.