A Comparative Study on Solution Construction Strategies for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Scheduling

초록

Heterogeneous multi-agent scheduling (HMAS) is a critical issue in the heterogeneous multi-agent systems. It involves task allocation and route generation, which is a typical NP-hard problem. To address this problem, researchers have designed various solution construction strategies, such as task-first agent assignment (TFAA), agent-first task assignment (AFTA), and simultaneous task assignment (STA) strategies. However, there remains a lack of comparative research on the effectiveness of these solution construction strategies. This paper integrates these three strategies into the widely adopted ant colony system (ACS) for comparison. Pheromones are deposited between tasks or between tasks and agents in the corresponding solution construction strategies. Multiple HMAS instances with varying scales are constructed for test. Experimental results indicate that the AFTA and STA strategies outperform the TFAA strategy. Index Terms—Heterogeneous multi-agent scheduling, solution construction strategy, multi-agent system, ant colony system, evolutionary computation

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