Distributed mutual exclusion based on dynamic costs

An extended version of distributed mutual exclusion on resources of capacity 1 for a distributed robotic system of N robots is discussed in the context of serving an event that may occur anywhere in the field of operation. The right to serve the event is treated as the resource. A dynamic, time-varying cost, with respect to the resource, is associated with each mobile robot. The author presents two algorithms for distributed mutual exclusion based on an abstracted time-varying cost. Both algorithms guarantee that exactly one robot that eventually arrives at the event scene and serves the event. These algorithms are free from starvation and deadlock