Indirect Cooperation in Distributed Stationary-Resource Searching with Predefined Destinations

Private vehicles are a direct means to bring people from one place to their desired destinations. However, no omniscient dispatcher is handling the origin-destination of vehicles and the availability of stationary resources, such as parking spaces or charging stations. Competitive cruising for stationary resources leads to environmental pollution and is a waste of drivers' time. We focus on the problem of distributed stationary-resource searching with predefined destinations under a multi-agent scenario. It is a distributed route planning problem with global optimization objectives. We present a probabilistic approach to achieving indirect resource coordination and latent agent cooperation in a distributed manner. Our approach treats the estimated availability of stationary resources as a reference and guides each agent based on their preferences. We evaluate our approach on four real-world datasets. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% in multi-criteria optimization.