Search and Rendezvous

This workshop is in honour of the 10th anniversary of Alpern and Gal's monograph on Search and Rendezvous.

The theory of search games and rendezvous is developed by computer scientists, mathematicians and lately it has come to the attention of biologists. Researchers from these and other fields can exchange their ideas at this workshop. Keynote lecturers of the workshop are Mark Broom, Shantanu Das, Shmuel Gal, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Evangelos Kranakis, David Peleg, and Jon Pitchford.

Game theory has traditionally been studied by mathematicians from an optimization point of view, with individual players, but lately the subject has been transformed by ideas from computer science and sociology, where the emphasis is on understanding and modeling the dynamic behavior of groups rather than individuals. These ideas have also influenced the development of search games. In computer science rendezvous problems emerge naturally to optimize the performance and the convergence of mobile robots. Modern research on the spreading of gossip or desease in social networks has led to new challenging problems in search and rendezvous. One can extend the rendezvous problem to groups that may collect in separate places, such as happens for instance in evacuation problems, which gives a new approach to study crowding. Another new direction of research comes from mathematical biologists who have used search games to understand predator-prey systems. Biologists and computer scientists have introduced random walks on graphs and its stochastic counterparts to the study of search in networks. Multiple random walks are used to model agent based search for instance. These new developments from stochastics have been taken up by mathematicians to study the classic Princess and Monster game by means of point processes. These and other directions of research will be highlighted during the workshop.