Monotone Decontamination of Arbitrary Dynamic Graphs with Mobile Agents

Abstract: Network decontamination is a well-known problem, in which the aim of the mobile agents should be to decontaminate the network (i.e., both nodes and edges). This problem comes with an added constraint, i.e., of \emph{monotonicity}, in which whenever a node or an edge is decontaminated, it must not get recontaminated. Hence, the name comes \emph{monotone decontamination}. This problem has been relatively explored in static graphs, but nothing is known yet in dynamic graphs. We, in this paper, study the \emph{monotone decontamination} problem in arbitrary dynamic graphs. We designed two models of dynamicity, based on the time within which a disappeared edge must reappear. In each of these two models, we proposed lower bounds as well as upper bounds on the number of agents, required to fully decontaminate the underlying dynamic graph, monotonically. Our results also highlight the difficulties faced due to the sudden disappearance or reappearance of edges. Our aim in this paper has been to primarily optimize the number of agents required to solve monotone decontamination in these dynamic networks.