Automated Transport Planning using Agents Leon Aronson, Roman van der Krogt, Cees Witteveen, Jonne Zutt

CABS project Design and evaluation of heuristics for multi-agent systems that cooperatively execute complex tasks. Testing the efficiency of a distributed approach, e.g. compare to centralistic approach from optimization theory.

Transportation domain Generality: AGV terminal, Schiphol airport, Taxi cabs, Trucks. Flexibility: dynamics, incident management, replanning. Hierarchical agent-based model. Integration of planning and replanning (dealing with incidents).

Characteristics bobtailing empty rides drop-and-pick incidents time-windows penalties cost function home locations

Architecture STRATEGIC PLANNER order assignments status reports TACTICAL PLANNER orders cost function INFRASTRUCTURE time and distance data routing acceptance routing data

Strategic Layer Responsible for assigning orders to transport agents such that the whole is efficient and reliable. Advantage: does not have to bother with planning details.

Strategic planning Agent selection: trade-off between minimizing slack and maximizing slack. Redistribution of orders: remove scheduled orders for a group of agents, then try to reschedule after sorting them according to a heuristic used for the bin-packing problem.

Tactical Layer Responsible for executing orders assigned to it, using the infrastructure and handling incidents. Communicates deviations from assignments to strategic planner.

Tactical Planning Uses a variant of D* [Stentz] algorithm used for robot path planning. Traffic-aware cost function. Smart infrastructure: roads and crossings provide route information of all transport agents.

Example What kind of example would be usefull?