On Game based Distributed Approach for General Multi-agent Optimal Coverage with Application to UAV Networks

This paper focuses on the optimal coverage problem (OCP) for multi-agent systems with a decentralized optimization mechanism. A game based distributed decision-making method for the multi-agent OCP is proposed to address the high computational costs arising from the large scale of the multi-agent system and to ensure that the game's equilibrium achieves the global performance objective's maximum value. In particular, a distributed algorithm that needs only local information is developed and proved to converge to near-optimal global coverage. Finally, the proposed method is applied to maximize the coverage area of the UAV network for a target region. The simulation results show that our method can require much less computational time than other typical distributed algorithms in related work, while achieving a faster convergence rate. Comparison with centralized optimization also demonstrates that the proposed method has approximate optimization results and high computation efficiency.