Multi-vehicle coordination and flexible scheduling based on Simulated Annealing Algorithm

In this paper, we consider a multi-vehicle coordination problem (MVCP), in which heterogeneous vehicles with different resources cooperate to accomplish a set of tasks. The distinct characters of MVCP are the duration of each task may vary within a given interval, and the objective is to allocate and schedule the vehicles to maximize the total time slacks between tasks given the deadline. The time slack represents the fleet´s capability to tolerate the temporal uncertainty. A model for MVCP is built and a solving method based on the Simulated Annealing Algorithm is proposed. The result of experiments shows the efficiency of the method.