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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Agent-based approaches to scheduling have gained increasing attention in recent years. One inherent advantage of agent-based approaches is their tendency for robust behavior; since activity is coordinated via local interaction protocols and decision policies, the system is insensitive to unpredictability in the executing environment. At the same time, such "self-scheduling" systems presume that a coherent global behavior will emerge from the local interactions of individual agents, and realizing this behavior remains a difficult problem. We draw on the adaptive behavior of the natural multi-agent system of the wasp colony as inspiration for decentralized mechanisms for coordinating factory operations. We compare the resulting systems to the state-of-the-art for the problems examined.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab and Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory

Associated Project(s): Distributed Coordination of Resources and Federation of Intelligent Robotic Explorers Project

Number of pages: 10

Text Reference

Vincent Cicirello and Stephen Smith , "Distributed Coordination of Resources via Wasp-like Agents," First NASA GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC), January, 2002.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Cicirello_2002_3796,
   author = "Vincent Cicirello and Stephen {Smith }",
   title = "Distributed Coordination of Resources via Wasp-like Agents",
   booktitle = "First NASA GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC)",
   month = "January",
   year = "2002",
}

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