Distributed Task Allocation in Dynamic Environments

This work investigates the behavior of a distributed team of agents on a dynamic distributed task allocation problem. Previous work finds that a distributed decision making process can effectively assign tasks appropriately to team members even when agents have only local information. We study this problem in a distributed environment in which agents can move, thus causing local neighborhoods to change over time. Results indicate that a higher level of adaptation is clearly required in the dynamic environment. Despite the increased difficulty, the distributed team is able achieve comparable behavior in both static and dynamic environments.