Multi-layered planar firefighting

Abstract

Consider a model of fire spreading through a graph; initially some vertices are burning, and at every given time-step fire spreads from burning vertices to their neighbors. The firefighter problem is a solitaire game in which a player is allowed, at every time-step, to protect some non-burning vertices (by effectively deleting them) in order to contain the fire growth. How many vertices per turn, on average, must be protected in order to stop the fire from spreading infinitely?Here we consider the problem on Z 2 × [h] for both nearest neighbor adjacency and strong adjacency. We determine the critical protection rates for these graphs to be 1.5h and 3h, respectively. This establishes the fact that using an optimal two-dimensional strategy for all layers in parallel is asymptotically optimal.