Mission assignment and scheduling for a team of service robots using evolutionary algorithms

This paper addresses the optimization of execution plan of assistance activities to be performed by a group of service robots in a healthcare environment. Centralised operation strategies for scheduling and assigning assistance activities to robots are proposed in order to efficiently and quickly meet the various requirements for robot assistance of the whole healthcare system. We first formulate the problem as a linear program and then propose different evolutionary algorithms. Numerical experimentations are conducted to assess the efficiency of these algorithms.