Decentralizing Coordination in Open Vehicle Fleets for Scalable and Dynamic Task Allocation

One of the major challenges in the coordination of large and open collaborative and commercial vehicle fleets is dynamic task allocation. Self-concerned individually rational vehicle drivers have both local and global objectives, which requires coordination using some fair and efficient task allocation method. In this paper, we review the literature on scalable and dynamic task allocation focusing on deterministic and dynamic two-dimensional linear assignment problems. We focus on multi-agent system representation of open vehicle fleets where dynamically appearing vehicles are represented by software agents that should be allocated to a set of dynamically appearing tasks. We give a comparison and critical analysis of recent research results focusing on centralized, distributed, and decentralized solution approaches. Moreover, we propose mathematical models for dynamic versions of the following assignment problems well-known in combinatorial optimization: the assignment problem, bottleneck assignment, fair matching problem, dynamic minimum deviation assignment problem, ∑k-assignment, the semi-assignment problem, the assignment problem with side constraints, and the assignment problem while recognizing agent qualification; all while considering the main aspect of open vehicle fleets: random arrival of tasks and vehicles (agents) that may become available after assisting previous tasks or by participating in the fleet at times based on individual interest.