An Effective Fleet Management Strategy for Collaborative Spatio-Temporal Searching: GIS Cup

The ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Cup 2020 focuses on the Collaborative Spatio-Temporal Searching (CSTS) problem, in which a fleet of mobile agents search for stationary resources on a road network. While each resource can be obtained by exactly one agent, agents can collaborate to obtain resources as quickly as possible. The key of solving CSTS is to guide agents to "hotspot" areas and to avoid the competition by considering agent collaboration. We propose a fleet management method by formulating CSTS as a minimum cost flow problem, called MCF-FM. In addition, we develop a continuous order dispatch strategy. Our submission is the top performer in the agent utilization scenario and runner-up in the customer experience scenario. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Chriszblong/MCF-FM.