Method of routing search groups on a fixed network for effective sweeping of populated areas and searching for armed criminals

The method proposed in this article addresses the problem of inefficient coverage of a given urban area by search teams, which is critical for the execution of search, rescue, and monitoring tasks in crisis-affected regions of various origins. The method employs the concept of dynamic programming, which consists in the successive decomposition of the initial structure of the urban transportation network into a set of substructures. Within each substructure, an edge-simple longest/shortest path (depending on the selected strategy) between a pair of specified vertices is determined. The collection of the identified extreme paths forms a Routing Plan for the search teams, which, in a certain sense, systematizes the sweep of the urban area. The method significantly reduces the labor and computational effort required to generate a rational variant of search operations and is intended for use by the military command and control bodies of the National Guard of Ukraine.