Cooperative strategies for spatial resource allocation

The field of cooperative control involves the study of situations in which groups of mobile agents (e.g., autonomous aircraft, etc.) must collaborate with each other in order to accomplish a collective goal. A large number of these situations may be classified as resource allocation problems, which is to say that the agents must determine how to use their available resources in the most effective manner. Because the agents are mobile, these problems often center around trying to achieve an optimal spatial distribution of the group. This distribution may be defined as either a specific set of coordinates or a specific trajectory for each agent, but more often there are a finite number of discrete sites at which the agents may be located over time (and potentially different tasks within each site to which they may be assigned). This dissertation addresses three different problems of the latter type: maintaining uniform surveillance of an environment, team formation within groups of heterogenous agents, and a cooperative selection process. For each problem we develop algorithms that can be used by a group to either achieve the appropriate distribution of agents or at least make a good effort towards that goal despite very restrictive conditions. This research both extends theoretical results from similar problems and introduces a number of novel problem formulations. Heuristic algorithms with good performance have also been developed for problems that resist analytical treatment.