Fundamenta Informaticae

The gathering over meeting nodes problem asks the robots to gather at one of the pre-defined meeting nodes. The robots are deployed on the nodes of an anonymous two-dimensional infinite grid, which has a subset of nodes marked as meeting nodes. Robots are identical, autonomous, anonymous and oblivious. They operate under an asynchronous scheduler. They do not have any agreement on a global coordinate system. All the initial configurations for which the problem is deterministically unsolvable have been characterized. A deterministic distributed algorithm has been proposed to solve the problem for the remaining configurations. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is studied in terms of the number of moves required for gathering. A lower bound concerning the total number of moves required to solve the gathering problem has been derived.

A number-conserving cellular automaton is a simplified model for a system of interacting particles. This paper contains two related constructions by which one can find all one-dimensional number-conserving cellular automata with one kind of particle.

The output of both methods is a “flow function”, which describes the movement of the particles. In the first method, one puts increasingly stronger restrictions on the particle flow until a single flow function is specified. There are no dead ends, every choice of restriction steps ends with a flow.

The second method uses the fact that the flow functions can be ordered and then form a lattice. This method consists of a recipe for the slowest flow that enforces a given minimal particle speed in one given neighbourhood. All other flow functions are then maxima of sets of these flows.

Other questions, like that about the nature of non-deterministic number-conserving rules, are treated briefly at the end.

In communication networks, the binding numbers of graphs (or networks) are often used to measure the vulnerability and robustness of graphs (or networks). Furthermore, the fractional factors of graphs and the fractional ID-[a, b]-factor-critical covered graphs have a great deal of important applications in the data transmission networks. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the binding numbers of graphs and the fractional ID-[a, b]-factor-critical covered graphs, and derive a binding number condition for a graph to be fractional ID-[a, b]-factor-critical covered, which is an extension of Zhou’s previous result [S. Zhou, Binding numbers for fractional ID-k-factor-critical graphs, Acta Mathematica Sinica, English Series 30(1)(2014)181–186].