Decentralized task allocation for surveillance systems with critical tasks

This paper considers the problem of assigning a set of tasks to a set of heterogeneous agents under the additional assumptions that some tasks must be necessarily allocated and therefore are critical for the assignment problem, and that each agent can execute a limited number of tasks. In order to solve this problem in a decentralized way (i.e., without any form of central supervision), we develop an extension of an algorithm proposed in the recent literature. After analyzing convergence and communication requirement of the algorithm, a set of numerical simulations is provided to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.