Task Allocation in the RoboCup Rescue Simulation Domain: A Short Note

We consider the problem of disaster mitigation in the RoboCup Rescue Simulation Environment [3] to be a task allocation problem where the tasks arrive dynamically and can change in intensity. These tasks can be performed by ambulance teams, re brigades and police forces with the help of an ambulance center, a re station and a police oÆce. However the agents don't get automatically noti ed of the tasks as soon as they arrive and hence it is necessary for the agents to explore the simulated world to discover new tasks and to notify other agents of these. In this paper we focus on the problem of task allocation. We have developed two approaches, a centralized combinatorial auction mechanism demonstrated at Agents-2001 and a distributed method which helped our agents nish third in RoboCup-Rescue 2001. With regard to task discovery, we use a greedy search method to explore the world{ agents count the number of times they have visited each node, and attempt to visit nodes that have been visited the least number of times.