We study the dynamic task assignment problem in which multiple dispersed vehicles are employed to visit a set of targets. Some targets’ locations are initially known and the others are dynamically randomly generated during a finite time horizon. The objective is to visit all the target locations while trying to minimize the vehicles’ total travel time. Based on existing algorithms used to deal with static multi-vehicle task assignment, two types of dynamic task assignments, namely event-triggered and time-triggered, are studied to investigate what the appropriate time instants should be to change in real time the assignment of the target locations in response to the newly generated target locations. Furthermore, for both the event- and time-triggered assignments, we propose several algorithms to investigate how to distribute the newly generated target locations to the vehicles. Extensive numerical simulations are carried out which show better performance of the event-triggered task assignment algorithms over the time-triggered algorithms under different arrival rates of the newly generated target locations.

中文翻译：

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多车事件和时间触发的动态任务分配

我们研究了动态任务分配问题，其中使用了多个分散的车辆来访问一组目标。最初知道一些目标的位置，而其他目标则在有限的时间范围内动态随机生成。目的是在尽量减少车辆总行驶时间的同时访问所有目标位置。基于用于处理静态多车辆任务分配的现有算法，研究了两种类型的动态任务分配，即事件触发和时间触发，以研究应实时更改实时车辆分配的适当时刻。目标位置以响应新生成的目标位置。此外，对于事件触发和时间触发的分配，我们提出了几种算法来研究如何将新生成的目标位置分配给车辆。进行了广泛的数值模拟，显示了在新生成的目标位置的不同到达率下，事件触发任务分配算法的性能优于时间触发算法。