Team Orienting Problem with Dynamic Reward and Mobile Support Station

It is known that various public venues, such as shopping malls and entertainment parks, are equipped with mobile agents capable of performing certain tasks, including inspections, security patrolling or waste management. Efficient task allocation and global path planning are pivotal for task implementation in the mobile agent team. In response to this requirement, this paper investigates the rational allocation of tasks and optimal global path planning for the agent team with mobile support station in the scenarios where multiple task points require to be visited multiple times and the rewards of the task points are changed dynamically. We refer to this problem as the Team Orienting Problem with Dynamic Rewards (TOPDR), modelled as a multi-objective optimization problem where the combination of NSGA-II & an optimal path planning algorithm is applied for the pareto-optimal solutions. The special population encoding, crossover, and mutation processes are designed based on the task scenario. Further, the concept of a mobile support station and a map-based path planning algorithm are introduced to calculate the energy consumption of the agent team where the rewards collected from the passed task points are considered during the task allocation. Simulation experiments have been performed with other methods for the performance comparison to verify the efficacy of the proposed task allocation and path planning method.