Multi-Agent Continuous Transportation with Online Balanced Partitioning (Extended Abstract)

We introduce the concept of continuous transportation task to the context of multi-agent systems. A continuous transportation task is one in which a multi-agent team visits a number of fixed locations, picks up objects, and delivers them to a transportation hub. The goal is to maximize the rate of transportation while the objects are replenished over time. In this extended abstract, we present a hybrid of centralized and distributed approaches that minimize communications in the multi-agent team. We contribute a novel online partitioning-transportation algorithm with information gathering in the multi-agent team.