Search for an immobile entity on a network

We consider the problem of searching for a single, uniformly distributed immobile entity on an undirected network. This problem differs from edge-covering problems, e.g., the Chinese Postman Problem (CPP), since the objective here is not to find the minimum length tour that covers all the edges at least once, but instead to minimize the expected time to find the entity. We introduce a heuristic algorithm to deal with the search process given that the entity is equally likely to be at any point on the network. Computational results are presented.