Hierarchical organizations for real-time large-scale task and team environments

In this paper, we describe the Distributed Dispatcher Manager (DDM), a system for monitoring large collections of dynamically changing tasks. We assume that tasks are distributed over a virtual space. Teams consist of very large groups of cooperative mobile agents. Each agent has direct access to only local and partial information about its immediate surroundings. DDM organizes teams hierarchically and addresses two important issues that are prerequisites for success in such domains: (i) how agents should process local information to provide a partial solution to nearby tasks, and (ii) how partial solutions should be integrated into a global solution. We conducted a large number of experiments in simulation and demonstrated the advantages of the DDM over other architectures in terms of accuracy and reduced inter-agent communication * .