Many-player rendezvous search: Stick together or split and meet?

Rendezvous search finds the strategies that players should use in order to find one another when they are separated in a region. Previous papers have concentrated on the case where there are two players searching for one another. This paper looks at the problem when there are more than two players and concentrates on what they should do if some but not all of them meet together. It looks at two strategies—the stick together one and the split up and meet again one. This paper shows that the former is optimal among the class of strategies which require no memory and are stationary, and it gives a method of calculating the expected rendezvous time under it. However, simulation results comparing both strategies suggest that in most situations the split up and meet again strategy which requires some memory leads to faster expected rendezvous times.