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AUCTIONEER – BRINGING ORDER TO A CHAOTIC PLANNING PROBLEM

ASI applied the power of c2it® in the AUCTIONEER project developed for the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA. The project explored decentralized control where a flight of eight UAVs self-organized to distribute tasks among themselves and improve mission performance. Free-market auctions were used to allocate tasks to the UAVs in the tactical environment. Distributed cost estimates were used to drive the assignment of tasks. ASI’s technology proved its worth – dramatically and unconditionally.

Concrete Improvements in a Chaotic Tactical Environment
Through this project, we were able to confirm that the use of auctions is able to bring order to a chaotic planning problem. ASI’s Associate Systems improved mission measures of performance such as lethality of targets and survivability. 

The AUCTIONEER project simulated eight unmanned air vehicles performing SEAD missions over a roughly 250 nautical mile area. The ratio of targets detected to air vehicles was 3:1. The rate of detection was approximately every 10 minutes with random spikes of simultaneous detections. Using least commitment planning, AUCTIONEER fielded a set of auction algorithms that were lightweight and made task assignments in approximately 3.5 seconds. The auction algorithms accounted for 0.5 seconds of the response time while the route planner accounted for three seconds of the response time.