Multirobot search for a stationary object placed in a known environment with a combination of GRASP and VND

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses the problem of multirobot search for a stationary object in an a priori known environment. Two variants of the problem are studied given the working environment represented by a graph. The first variant is an extension of the traveling deliveryman problem for multiple vehicles, while the second variant is a generalization of the graph search problem. A novel algorithm is presented to solve both problems, which is based on a combination of greedy randomized adaptive search procedure with variable neighborhood descent. A set of experimental evaluations were conducted over the benchmark instances derived from the TSPLIB library. For both problems, the results obtained show that the proposed approach is comparable to state‐of‐the‐art heuristics. Moreover, for problems of a few hundred vertices, the solution times suggest that the approach is suitable for online decision‐making in search and rescue.