A distributed cooperative reinforcement learning method for decision making in fire brigade teams

Abstract

Decision making in complex, multi-agent and dynamic environments such as disaster spaces is a challenging problem in Artificial Intelligence. This research paper aims at developing distributed coordination and cooperation method based on reinforcement learning to enable team of homogeneous, autonomous fire fighter agents, with similar skills to accomplish complex task allocation, with emphasis on firefighting tasks in disaster space. The main contribution is applying reinforcement learning to solve the bottleneck caused by dynamicity and variety of conditions in such situations as well as improving the distributed coordination of fire fighter agent's to extinguish fires within a disaster zone. The proposed method increases the speed of learning; it has very low memory usage and has a good scalability and robustness in the case that the number of agents and complexity of task increases. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown through simulation results. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.