A Distributed Approach to the Evasion Problem

The Evasion Problem is the question of whether—given a collection of sensors and a particular movement pattern over time—it is possible to stay undetected within the domain over the same stretch of time. It has been studied using topological techniques since 2006—with sufficient conditions for non-existence of an Evasion Path provided by de Silva and Ghrist; sufficient and necessary conditions with extended sensor capabilities provided by Adams and Carlsson; and sufficient and necessary conditions using sheaf theory by Krishnan and Ghrist. In this paper, we propose three algorithms for the Evasion Problem: one distributed algorithm extension of Adams’ approach for evasion path detection, and two different approaches to evasion path enumeration.