The reporting time problem: Integration of intelligence with verification

This article is a theoretic study of the following problem in verification: Mobile units under control of an agent, who is called the HIDER, travel on a known transportation network and must at the conclusion of their itinerary report locations at fixed time intervals to a monitoring authority, who is called the SEEKER. The purpose of this reporting requirement is to verify that illegal units do not infiltrate the network from sources under the control of the HIDER. It is assumed that the SEEKER has an independent intelligence-gathering capability which gives sightings of both legal and illegal units. The purpose of this article is to quantify the advantage of frequent over infrequent reporting.