Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery in a Distributed Baggage Handling System

Baggage handling systems in airports are generally over-designed and only need to work at full capacity for a couple of months during their lifetime. To cope with varying demand, flexible baggage handling systems are being developed which use Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) to handle a required capacity. These AGVs transport bags throughout the...

Auction-based task allocation for online pickup and delivery problems with time constraints and uncertainty

Auctions have established themselves as highly efficient mechanisms for the online allocation of time-constrained pickup and delivery tasks, which is an important problem in the domain of distributed autonomous systems. Current methods leverage simple temporal networks (STNs) to allow agents to efficiently process temporal constraints in the...

Online Agent-Based Aerial Patrol Planning for Wildlife Surveillance

Wildlife conservation efforts are constrained by a limited amount of resources available for surveillance activities. UAVs are used increasingly to assist rangers in patrol tasks. Effectively patrolling wildlife parks requires detailed knowledge of the environment and its threats, which is not always available. Previous work in Green Security...

Airport Surface Planning under Uncertainty

This thesis describes a solution to the Ground Movement Problem, formulated by Atkin et al. in 2010. It is described as a routing and scheduling problem and involves directing aircraft to their destinations in a timely matter, with the aim to either reduce the overall travel time and/or to meet some target time windows. A Markov Decision Process...

A quantitative comparison study of a contextual and cognitive model of Air Traffic Controller workload

Up to this point, research into Air Traffic Controller workload has primarily focused on a number of discrete areas. However, it is widely recognized that different components from these respective fields all contribute to the workload an Air Traffic Controller experiences. Hence, this study has tried to bridge this gap by quantitatively...