Task Allocation Using a Distributed Market-Based Planning Mechanism
Dani Goldberg, Vincent Cicirello, M. Bernardine Dias, Reid Simmons, Stephen Smith, and Anthony Stentz
In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2003), pages 996-997. ACM Press, . doi:10.1145/860575.860763
Abstract
This paper describes a market-based planning mechanism used for task and resource allocation within a larger distributed, multi-robot control and coordination architecture. We are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer: at the behavioral level, the robots create distributed control loops; at the executive level, they synchronize task execution; at the planning level, they use market-based techniques to allocate tasks and resources. This paper focusses on the market-based planning layer, which is comprised of two main components: a trader that participates in the market, auctioning and bidding on tasks; and a scheduler that determines task feasibility and cost for the trader, and interacts with the executive layer for task execution.