Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

 

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• [P1237] Sequential Auctions for Heterogeneous Task Allocation in Multiagent Routing Domains
  Author(s): George Thomas, Andrew B. Williams
  
  

  Abstract
  Many realistic problem domains are composed of heterogeneous tasks distributed in a physical environment. A team of mobile agents has to autonomously allocate these tasks amongst themselves, and then navigate to the tasks and execute them. Lately, auctions have been used for task allocation among homogeneous agents. Less studied is the case of allocation where both the tasks and the agents are heterogeneous in nature. In this paper, we investigate the market-based allocation of heterogeneous tasks to heterogeneous agents in domains where the distribution of the task heterogeneity is known a priori. We present a model of task heterogeneity, and define a metric that allows us to assess the fitness of a team for a particular task domain. We then present a sequential, round-based, auction for allocating heterogeneous tasks to heterogeneous teams. We empirically investigate the performance of three different auction strategies with simultaneous parallel auctions.

  
   

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