Optimal Art Gallery Localization is NP-hard

Abstract

Art Gallery Localization (AGL) is the problem of placing a set $T$ of broadcast towers in a simple polygon $P$ in order for a point to locate itself in the interior. For any point $p\in P$: for each tower $t\in T\cap V(p)$ (where $V(p)$ denotes the visibility polygon of $p$) the point $p$ receives the coordinates of $t$ and the Euclidean distance between $t$ and $p$. From this information $p$ can determine its coordinates. We study the computational complexity of AGL problem. We show that the problem of determining the minimum number of broadcast towers that can localize a point anywhere in a simple polygon $P$ is NP-hard. We show a reduction from Boolean Three Satisfiability problem to our problem and give a proof that the reduction takes polynomial time.

12 pages; 13 figures; submitted to the Journal of Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications