Multi-vehicle Routing

Abstract

Multi-vehicle routing problems in systems and control theory are concerned with the design of control policies to coordinate several vehicles moving in a metric space, in order to complete spatially localized, exogenously generated tasks in an efficient way. Control policies depend on several factors, including the definition of the tasks, of the task generation process, of the vehicle dynamics and constraints, of the information available to the vehicles, and of the performance objective. Ensuring the stability of the system, i.e., the uniform boundedness of the number of outstanding tasks, is a primary concern. Typical performance objectives are represented by measures of quality of service, such as the average or worst-case time a task spends in the system before being completed or the percentage of tasks that are completed before certain deadlines. The scalability of the control policies to large groups of vehicles often drives the choice of the information structure, requiring distributed computation.