Minimizing the Maximum Moving Cost of Interval Coverage

In this paper, we consider an interval coverage problem. We are given [Formula: see text] intervals of the same length on a line [Formula: see text] and a line segment [Formula: see text] on [Formula: see text]. Each interval has a nonnegative weight. The goal is to move the intervals along [Formula: see text] such that every point of [Formula: see text] is covered by at least one interval and the maximum moving cost of all intervals is minimized, where the moving cost of each interval is its moving distance times its weight. Algorithms for the “unweighted” version of this problem have been given before. In this paper, we present a first-known algorithm for this weighted version and our algorithm runs in [Formula: see text] time. The problem has applications in mobile sensor barrier coverage, where [Formula: see text] is the barrier and each interval is the covering interval of a mobile sensor.