Multiagent Task Allocation in Complementary Teams: A Hunter-and-Gatherer Approach

Table 1

Illustration of the notations used globally in this paper.

Symbol	Definition
	The task set where and
	The k^th member of where
	The agent set where
and	The i^th and j^th members of and , respectively
and	The cost associated with for accomplishment of and the cost associated with for accomplishment of , respectively
	Defined as , where and are the total number of hunters and gatherers, respectively
	The assignment function which assigns m tasks to agents such that
	The global objective which is to minimize the collective cost of
and	The weighting parameters of hunters and gatherers, respectively
and	The binary decision variables for and , respectively
and	The incentive rewards for accomplishing a hunting or gathering task, respectively
	An extra incentive for motivating agents from complementary teams to build up a cooperation
	A generalized subscript designated to denote both hunter and gatherer agents, where:
	Share of the i^th hunter in for hunting the k^th task
	Share of the j^th gatherer in for gathering the k^th task
	Total number of hunters that have detected a task and are waiting for starting a negotiation
and	Scaling parameters of certainty profit margins of hunters and gatherers, respectively
and	Scaling parameters of uncertainty profit margins of hunters and gatherers, respectively
and	Certainty radius for hunters and gatherers, respectively
and	Uncertainty radius for hunters and gatherers, respectively
	The profit earned by a hunter for the k^th task
	The profit earned by a gatherer for the k^th task
and	Profit interval of a hunter and gatherer, respectively
and	Lower and upper bounds of a hunter, respectively
and	Lower and upper bounds of a gatherer, respectively
	An offer made by the j^th gatherer to the i^th hunter for the k^th task
	A bid placed by the j^th gatherer to the i^th hunter for the k^th task
	Action plan of the j^th gatherer where and with as the maximum number of tasks that a gatherer can queue