Distributed Medical Evacuation Planning: What Problem Should Each Agent Solve?

Contents

In the applied research being described here, there is a natural decomposition of a planning problem along geographic lines, where each sub-problem is to be solved by an agent whose organizational authority covers the geographic sector. However, the nature of the problem is such that each agent’s solution has major impact on the problem to be solved by other agents, and multiple iterations of definiag the problem solving process are required, until a process is agreed upon which is acceptable to the users as well as algorithmically sound. We formulate the concept of"constraint trespassing", which occurs when agents impose constraints on resources owned by other agents, and emphasize and illustrate the importance of minimizing it.