RoboCup Rescue: a grand challenge for multi-agent systems

Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issue which involves very large numbers of heterogenous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup-Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain by creating a standard simulator and forum for researchers and practitioners. While the rescue domain is intuitively appealing as a large-scale multi-agent domain, the characteristics of the domain have not been thoroughly analysed. In this paper, we present detailed analysis on the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multi-agent systems for this domain.