Sequential auctions for heterogeneous task allocation in multiagent routing domains

Many realistic problem domains are composed of heterogeneous tasks distributed in a physical environment. A team of mobile agents has to autonomously allocate these tasks, navigate to them and finally execute them. Recently auctions have been used for task allocation among homogeneous agents. Less studied is the case of allocation where both the tasks and the agents are heterogeneous in nature. In this paper, we investigate the market-based allocation of heterogeneous tasks to heterogeneous agents in domains where the distribution of the task heterogeneity is known a priori. We present a model of task heterogeneity, and define a metric that allows us to assess the fitness of a team for a particular task domain. We then present a sequential, round-based, auction setup for allocating heterogeneous tasks to heterogeneous teams and empirically investigate the performance of three different allocation strategies.