Metaheuristic Approaches for the Minimum Vertex Guard Problem

We address the problem of stationing guards in vertices of a simple polygon in such a way that the whole polygon is guarded and the number of guards is minimum. This problem is NP-hard with relevant practical applications. In this paper we propose three metaheuristic approaches to this problem. Combined with the genetic algorithms strategy, which was proposed, these four approximation algorithms have been implemented and compared. The experimental evaluation from the hybrid strategy shows significant improvement in the number of guards compared to theoretical bounds.