Co-Optimizating Multi-Agent Placement with Task Assignment and Scheduling / 3308
Chongjie Zhang, Julie A. Shah

To enable large-scale multi-agent coordination under temporal and spatial constraints, we formulate it as a multi-level optimization problem and develop a multi-abstraction search approach for co-optimizing agent placement with task assignment and scheduling. This approach begins with a highly abstract agent placement problem and the rapid computation of an initial solution, which is then improved upon using a hill climbing algorithm for a less abstract problem; finally, the solution is fine-tuned within the original problem space. Empirical results demonstrate that this multi-abstraction approach significantly outperforms a conventional hill climbing algorithm and an approximate mixed-integer linear programming approach.

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