High reliable and efficient task allocation in networked multi-agent systems

Task allocation in networked multi-agent systems refers to agents’ coordination and cooperation in order to provide the required resources of task in a way to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. One of the important goals pursued in task allocation is to decrease the task execution time achieved through reducing the communication time and waiting time. For this aim, it seems that two important effective factors in the communication time are agents’ talents and distances between them. Applying these factors in task allocation process leads to local allocation of tasks to required resources. Agents’ failure is an important issue, which challenges task allocation in networked multi-agent systems in two ways: agent’s failure fails the process of task allocation. This makes task be rescheduled which is a time consuming process. In addition, due to the changes made in networked structure of the system, an efficient allocation of tasks to resources is not ensured. This paper employed a novel approach in which the reliability of agents is another important factor in task allocation. Simulation results indicated that assigning tasks to agents with higher reliability leads to a higher success rate, and consequently a lower execution time in task allocation.