ABSTRACT
Imagine a group of cooperating agents attempting to allocate tasks amongst themselves without knowledge of their own capabilities. Over time, they develop a belief of their own skill levels through failed attempts at completing the tasks they are assigned. How will various task allocation approaches perform when there exists this added level of complexity? In particular, we compare two task allocation strategies: a greedy, first-come-first-serve approach, and a more intelligent, best-fit method. By varying the number of tasks along with the amount of time it takes to complete those tasks, we find that the different task allocation methods work better in different situations. Because of the way the tasks are allocated by the two methods, the greedy approach does a better job of giving agents opportunities to learn their capabilities. Thus, the greedy approach allows for quicker learning and performs better on problems where the task durations are short, whereas the best-fit method performs better on problems where the task quantity and durations are large. What is needed is a hybrid method that balances between the exploration of the greedy approach and the exploitation of the best-fit method.
- C. Anderson and N. R. Franks. Teams in animal societies. Behavioural Ecology, 12(5):534--540, 2001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- N. R. Franks. Teams in social insects: group retrieval of prey by army ants (eciton burchelli, hymenoptera: Formicidae). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 18(6):425--429, 1986.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. P. Gerkey and M. J. Mataric. A formal analysis and taxonomy of task allocation in multi-robot systems. International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9):939--954, September 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- H. C. Lau and L. Zhang. Task allocation via multi-agent coalition formation: Taxonomy, algorithms and complexity. In ICTAI'03: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, page 346, Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. C. Lueth and T. Laengle. Task description, decomposition and allocation in a distributed autonomous multi-agent robot system. In Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 1516--1523, September 1994.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. J. Mataric, G. S. Sukhatme, and E. H. Østergaard. Multirobot task allocation in uncertain environments. Autonomous Robots, 14(23):255--263, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. R. Noreils. An architecture for cooperative and autonomous mobile robots. In Proceedings of the 1992 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 2703--2710, May 1992.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. G. Smith and R. Davis. Frameworks for cooperation in distributed problem solving. SMC-11(1):61--70, January 1981.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Learning and exploiting knowledge in multi-agent task allocation problems
Recommendations
Multi-agent task allocation: learning when to say no
GECCO '08: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computationThis paper presents a communication-less multi-agent task allocation procedure that allows agents to use past experience to make non-greedy decisions about task assignments. Experimental results are given for problems where agents have varying ...
High reliable and efficient task allocation in networked multi-agent systems
Task allocation in networked multi-agent systems refers to agents' coordination and cooperation in order to provide the required resources of task in a way to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. One of the important goals pursued in task ...
Agent Division and Fusion for Task Execution in Undependable Multiagent Systems
ICTAI '14: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 26th International Conference on Tools with Artificial IntelligenceIn multiagent systems, agents with limited capacity often cooperate in order to accomplish various types of tasks. Due to the openness of multiagent systems, agents may run the risk of their cooperations to accomplish tasks because of some involved ...
Comments