Coalition Formation with Spatial and Temporal Constraints

Ramchurn, S. D., Polukarov, M., Farinelli, A., Jennings, N. and Trong, C. (2010) Coalition Formation with Spatial and Temporal Constraints. In: International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2010), May 2010, Toronto, Canada. pp. 1181-1188.

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Abstract

The coordination of emergency responders and robots to undertake
a number of tasks in disaster scenarios is a grand challenge for
multi-agent systems. Central to this endeavour is the problem of
forming the best teams (coalitions) of responders to perform the
various tasks in the area where the disaster has struck. Moreover,
these teams may have to form, disband, and reform in different areas
of the disaster region. This is because in most cases there will
be more tasks than agents. Hence, agents need to schedule themselves
to attempt each task in turn. Second, the tasks themselves
can be very complex: requiring the agents to work on them for different
lengths of time and having deadlines by when they need to
be completed. The problem is complicated still further when different
coalitions perform tasks with different levels of efficiency.
Given all these facets, we define this as The Coalition Formation
with Spatial and Temporal constraints problem (CFSTP).We show
that this problem is NP-hard—in particular, it contains the wellknown
complex combinatorial problem of Team Orienteering as a
special case. Based on this, we design a Mixed Integer Program
to optimally solve small-scale instances of the CFSTP and develop
new anytime heuristics that can, on average, complete 97% of the
tasks for large problems (20 agents and 300 tasks). In so doing, our
solutions represent the first results for CFSTP.