Reaction functions for task allocation to cooperative agents
Xiaoming Zheng, Sven Koenig · 2008
In this paper, we present ARF, our initial effort at solving taskallocation problems where cooperative agents need to perform tasks simultaneously. An example is multi-agent routing problems where several agents need to visit targets simultaneously, for example, to move obstacles out of the way cooperatively. First, we propose reaction functions as a novel way of characterizing the costs of agents in a distributed way. Second, we show how to approximate reaction functions so that their computation and communication times are polynomial. Third, we show how reaction functions can be used by a central planner to allocate tasks to agents. Finally, we show experimentally that the resulting task allocations are better than those of other greedy methods that do not use reaction functions.