Evaluation of Decision-making Strategies for Robots in Intralogistics Problems Using Multi-agent Planning

摘要

Robots are currently being used in many real-world problems, especially intralogistics scenarios where manufacturing and warehousing are continuously performed. Those robots can be affected by exogenous events that cause failures during their execution, leading to a dynamic environment condition. Thus, robots interact not only with the environment but also with other agents, therefore they require a coordination protocol to guarantee cooperation and recovery from unexpected events. The intralogistics problem is a real-world application to a multi-agent planning model where agents are seen as autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Related work highlights the autonomy level and investigates different strategies for applying a decision-making process. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding an analysis of the conditions that make a decentralized decision-making process more suitable than a centralized control in a dynamic environment. This study investigates how strongly connected AMRs are, according to their nature, and the conditions and effects of the actions they can execute. We contribute to the research area by detailing how the analysis of features of the intralogistics scenario can be useful to identify the most suitable decision-making strategy for AMRs in such dynamic environments.