A Decentralized Asynchronous Collaborative Genetic Algorithm for Heterogeneous Multi-agent Search and Rescue Problems

In this paper we propose a version of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for combined task assignment and path planning that is highly decentralized in the sense that each agent only knows its own capabilities and data, and a set of so-called handover values communicated to it from the other agents over an unreliable low bandwidth communication channel. These handover values are used in combination with a local GA involving no other agents, to decide what tasks to execute, and what tasks to leave to others. We compare the performance of our approach to a centralized version of GA, and a partly decentralized version of GA where computations are local, but all agents need complete information regarding all other agents, including position, range, battery, and local obstacle maps. We compare solution performance as well as messages sent for the three algorithms, and conclude that the proposed algorithms has a small decrease in performance, but a significant decrease in required communication.