Capability-based task allocation in emergency-response environments: A coalition formation approach

Abstract

This paper addresses coalition formation, based on agent capabilities, centered on task allocation in emergency-response environments (EREs). EREs are environments that need fast task completion as their main requirement. We propose a team-based organization model, based on an existing organization model for adaptive complex systems. The model has some key characteristics that are beneficial for EREs: agents act in dynamic, open domains; agents collaborate in completing group tasks; agents may have similar types of capabilities, but at different levels; tasks need different agent capabilities, at collective different levels; and agents are supervised in a partially decentralized manner. We formulate task allocation as a capability-based coalition-formation problem, propose a greedy myopic algorithm to form coalitions, and compare it with F-Max-Sum, another efficient myopic algorithm. Experiments in which utility is measured show that the capability-based approach outperforms the role-based one. The numerical experiments suggest that the proposed task allocation method is possibly scalable with growing numbers of agents.

Adaptive auction protocol for task assignment in wireless sensor and actuator networks

“…Subsequently, the auctioneer selects the optimal actuator with the highest reward which means high efficiency and low-energy cost. The issue of cooperation between actuators has been studied in Mezei et al, 10 Fatemi et al, 11 Kim and Matson, 12 Geyik et al, 13 and Panchu et al 14 These literatures use appropriate mechanisms to find the optimal actuator in a particular application scenario with fixed network parameters. However, they ignore that the network parameter is time-varying in some scenarios.…”