Improving tasks allocation and coordination in a rescue scenario

This paper presents a proposal aimed at improving the task allocation and the coordination of rescue agents in a disaster scenario. Task allocation is related to allocating victims to be rescued by each agent, while coordination is related to how these agents interact among themselves to save a larger number of victims. Rescuing lives in disasters takes place in a dynamic environment in which new victims appear all the time. In addition, the victims´ injuries aggravate over time. A due-date-based technique is presented to schedule the tasks in the rescue operations. In this sense, the victims are sequenced in a non-decreasing death time order. To do that, our rescue agents search for the victims and predict their death time to establish a victim priority order in our scheduling algorithm and coordinate the rescue agents. Past rescue experiences of our rescue team are used in the victims´ death time estimations. Several experiments using the RoboCup Rescue simulator are presented to prove the feasibility of our approach to improving multiagent performance.