Abstract
Principal–assistant agent teams are often employed to solve tasks in multiagent collaboration systems. Assistant agents attached to the principal agents are more flexible for task execution and can assist them to complete tasks with complex constraints. However, how to employ principal–assistant agent teams to execute time-critical tasks considering the dependency between agents and the constraints among tasks is still a challenge so far. In this paper, we investigate the principal–assistant collaboration problem with deadlines, which is to allocate tasks to suitable principal–assistant teams and construct routes satisfying the temporal constraints. Two cases are considered in this paper, including single principal–assistant teams and multiple principal–assistant teams. The former is formally formulated in an arc-based integer linear programming model. We develop a hybrid combination algorithm for adapting larger scales, the idea of which is to find an optimal combination of partial routes generated by heuristic methods. The latter is defined in a path-based integer linear programming model, and a branch-and-price-based (BP-based) algorithm is proposed that introduces the number of assistant-accessible tasks surrounding a task to guide the route construction. Experimental results validate that the hybrid combination algorithm and the BP-based algorithm are superior to the benchmarks in terms of the number of served tasks and the running time.
Highlights
The hybrid principal–assistant collaboration architecture is often employed to improve the efficiency of task execution in a multiagent system [1,2], where the principal agents in a team are assisted by the assistant agents to complete the arrival tasks
The principal–assistant collaboration problem can be considered as a new variety of the traveling salesman problem, concerning the cooperation of the principal agent routing and the assistant agent routing for tasks [4,5]
We investigate the principal–assistant collaboration problem with deadlines, where each task is associated with an independent deadline and the principal–assistant teams need to find valid routes with temporal constraints
Summary
The hybrid principal–assistant collaboration architecture is often employed to improve the efficiency of task execution in a multiagent system [1,2], where the principal agents in a team are assisted by the assistant agents to complete the arrival tasks. The introduction of assistant agents improves the flexibility of collaboration of agents in multiagent systems [1,3]. The principal–assistant collaboration problem can be considered as a new variety of the traveling salesman problem, concerning the cooperation of the principal agent routing and the assistant agent routing for tasks [4,5]. We investigate the principal–assistant collaboration problem with deadlines, where each task is associated with an independent deadline and the principal–assistant teams need to find valid routes with temporal constraints. If and only if the optimal solution of the deadline-TSP can be found in polynomial time, the optimal solution of the principal–assistant collaboration problem with deadlines can be found in polynomial time
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