A Decision-making Method for Swarm Agents in Attack-defense Confrontation

Abstract

The cooperative decision-making of swarm agents has attracted extensive attention from researchers due to its potential applications in multidisciplinary engineering problems. This paper studies a confrontation problem called asymmetric attack-defense confrontation (i.e., considering the difference in capability and quantity between agents and targets). The objective is to develop an effective self-organized swarm confrontation decision-making method. The decision-making process consists of task allocation decision and swarm motion decision. At each decision-making step, firstly, each agent forms a coalition with other agents autonomously by using a proposed hedonic coalition formation algorithm according to the attribute of targets. Thus, the agents assigned to the same target form a coalition, and swarm agents form several disjoint coalitions. Then, based on the allocated results, the agents are steered toward the corresponding target by a combat stimulus and a proposed selected interaction swarm algorithm. Finally, while the targets are within the agents’ attack radius, the agents execute the confrontation decision. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the designed method.