Comparison of different coordination strategies for the RoboCupRescue simulation

Abstract

A fundamental difficulty faced by cooperative multiagent systems is to find how to efficiently coordinate agents. There are three fundamental processes to solve the coordination problem: mutual adjustment, direct supervision and standardization. In this paper, we present our results, obtained in the Robo-CupRescue environment, comparing those coordination approaches to find which one is the best for a complex real-time problem like this one. Our results show that a decentralized approach based on mutual adjustment can be more flexible and give better results than a centralized approach using direct supervision. Also, we have obtained results showing that a standardization rule like the partitioning of the map can be helpful in those kind of environments.