A Regional Necessity Based Multi-agent Target Search Strategy for Post-earthquake Rescue

The damage caused by the earthquake is huge. And the purpose of post-earthquake rescue is to reduce casualties. So it is necessary to improve the efficiency of rescue as much as possible. This paper focuses on multi-agent cooperative target search in the post-earthquake rescue and how to exploit the prior information of post-disaster building to improve the searching efficiency. A regional necessity based searching strategy is proposed which utilizes pre-disaster building information and adapts to dynamic environments. Firstly, the target probability map is estimated according to the distribution information of pre-disaster buildings. Then, the regional necessity map is constructed by integrating the target probability map and the perception of the environment during the search process. Finally, the search strategy is proposed based on the regional necessity map and the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Combining the gradient direction of regional necessity and local optimal velocity, the agent dynamically selects the search direction. By comparing with other search strategies in simulation experiments, the proposed strategy could shorten the searching time and improve the searching efficiency in the small and medium-scale task environment. Meanwhile, the search strategy can adapt to the post-earthquake dynamic environment, which is confirmed by dynamic experiments.