Comparing probabilistic heuristics for guarding polyhedral terrain

Guarding surfaces is one of many optimization problems of the visibility analysis. It has many applications and it usually represents the computation of the minimum number of observers that guard a specific surface or region of interest. In the paper, we treated the problem of basic terrain guarding by using probabilistic optimization techniques. Four heuristics and their versions are presented: hillclimbing, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm and tabu search. Their performances were experimented and compared as applied to several actual topographic surfaces and showed that the most suitable approach were hillclimbing with next ascent approach and tabu search