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Efficient routing of multiple vehicles with no explicit communications
Author(s) -
Arsie Alessandro,
Frazzoli Emilio
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
international journal of robust and nonlinear control
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 106
eISSN - 1099-1239
pISSN - 1049-8923
DOI - 10.1002/rnc.1258
Subject(s) - computer science , routing (electronic design automation) , convergence (economics) , class (philosophy) , process (computing) , mathematical optimization , point (geometry) , state (computer science) , order (exchange) , rate of convergence , distributed computing , computer network , mathematics , artificial intelligence , algorithm , channel (broadcasting) , geometry , finance , economics , economic growth , operating system
In this paper, we consider a class of dynamic vehicle routing problems, in which a number of mobile agents in the plane must visit target points generated over time by a stochastic process. It is desired to design motion coordination strategies in order to minimize the expected time between the appearance of a target point and the time it is visited by one of the agents. We propose control strategies that, while making minimal or no assumptions on communications between agents, provide the same level of steady‐state performance achieved by the best‐known decentralized strategies. In other words, we demonstrate that inter‐agent communication does not improve the efficiency of such systems, but merely affects the rate of convergence to the steady state. Furthermore, the proposed strategies do not rely on the knowledge of the details of the underlying stochastic process. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.