Automated Scheduling of Multi-Robot System Missions: An Architectural Perspective (short paper).

The doctoral project summarised in this paper proposes a modular software architecture for the scheduling of multi-robot system (MRS) missions with complex functional and nonfunctional requirements. The new architecture comprises separate components for maintaining specifications of the mission tasks, environment and robot capabilities, for allocating the required tasks to the available robots, for scheduling the tasks executed by each robot, etc.—all of these providing guarantees that the mission requirements will be achieved. Each such component and its elements can be flexibly instantiated using either offthe-shelf software (e.g., constraint solvers or model checkers) or purpose-built software modules. To show the feasibility of the proposed MRS mission-scheduling architecture, we instantiated it using Alloy Analyzer to allocate mission tasks and the PRISM probabilistic model checker to generate individual robot plans for a hospital case study involving the scheduling of MRS missions that required cleaning, sanitising and moving medical equipment in multiple hospital rooms.