Routing in networks of autonomous underwater vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles have a wide range of applications, but their limited capabilities make it difficult to perform some time critical functions. To coordinate joint actions between agents, it is proposed to use a multi-agent approach with information exchange. For networks of autonomous underwater vehicles, information interaction is carried out with sound underwater communication equipment, which shows non-directional radiation and imposes limitations on speed (kilobits per second) and on the radius of information exchange. This results in the need for planning an exchange route using nodes as repeaters. The paper considers issues of routing exchanges for such networks. The research focuses on the problem of ordering the sequence of messages in each of the devices at the stage of the transmission session. The issue of ordering messages is reduced to the well-known problem of flow shop planning according to the total optimization criterion that is minimizing the average time spent by job in the system. The authors present an algorithm for scheduling communication sessions based on the concept of a resolvable class of systems. Based on information interaction between subscribers, it is proposed to correlate the state of the network with one of the resolvable classes of systems with the subsequent application of the scheduling algorithm. The main results involve the analysis of an algorithm for scheduling exchanges and present a model of its operation. Assertions are formulated and proved for four known decidable classes of systems. The developed algorithm makes it possible to reduce the total time of information exchange in the network of autonomous underwater vehicles and can be used by specialists in the design of equipment for sound underwater communications.