  Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is the problem of distributing a set of
tasks to a team of robots with the objective of optimising some criteria, such
as minimising the amount of time or energy spent to complete all the tasks or
maximising the efficiency of the team's joint activity. The exploration of MRTA
methods is typically restricted to laboratory and field experimentation. There
are few existing real-world models in which teams of autonomous mobile robots
are deployed "in the wild", e.g., in industrial settings. In the work presented
here, a market-based MRTA approach is applied to the problem of ambulance
dispatch, where ambulances are allocated in respond to patients' calls for
help. Ambulances and robots are limited (and perhaps scarce), specialised
mobile resources; incidents and tasks represent time-sensitive, specific,
potentially unlimited, precisely-located demands for the services which the
resources provide. Historical data from the London Ambulance Service describing
a set of more than 1 million (anonymised) incidents are used as the basis for
evaluating the predicted performance of the market-based approach versus the
current, largely manual, method of allocating ambulances to incidents.
Experimental results show statistically significant improvement in response
times when using the market-based approach.
