2020/03/11 by Eric Schneider, Schneider, Eric, M. Poulton +12
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Facility Location and Emergency Management #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Robotics (cs.RO) #Supply Chain and Inventory Management #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.05550
openalex publication_date 2020/03/11 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is the problem of distributing a set of\ntasks to a team of robots with the objective of optimising some criteria, such\nas minimising the amount of time or energy spent to complete all the tasks or\nmaximising the efficiency of the team's joint activity. The exploration of MRTA\nmethods is typically restricted to laboratory and field experimentation. There\nare few existing real-world models in which teams of autonomous mobile robots\nare deployed "in the wild", e.g., in industrial settings. In the work presented\nhere, a market-based MRTA approach is applied to the problem of ambulance\ndispatch, where ambulances are allocated in respond to patients' calls for\nhelp. Ambulances and robots are limited (and perhaps scarce), specialised\nmobile resources; incidents and tasks represent time-sensitive, specific,\npotentially unlimited, precisely-located demands for the services which the\nresources provide. Historical data from the London Ambulance Service describing\na set of more than 1 million (anonymised) incidents are used as the basis for\nevaluating the predicted performance of the market-based approach versus the\ncurrent, largely manual, method of allocating ambulances to incidents.\nExperimental results show statistically significant improvement in response\ntimes when using the market-based approach.\n