Maritime Search and Rescue Networking Based on Multi-Agent Cooperative Communication.

Rapid and effective maritime search and rescue operations become the important guarantee for the safety of maritime navigation. The existing maritime search and rescue networking and model have slow response speed and low efficiency. The distribution, synergy, parallelism, robustness and intelligence of unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) provide a new idea for the novel maritime search and rescue networking, in which multi-agent could be used to build a layered control network. In this paper, a novel rapid search and rescue system is proposed by utilizing the improved ant colony optimization and the independent calculation decision of the agents. The system adopts the edge computing, relies on the information sharing and the cooperative decision between the search and rescue agent groups. It achieves the independent synchronous search and rescue. At the same time, we use particle swarm optimization to intelligently schedule data packets during the rescue process to optimize network forwarding performance. Based on the distributed cluster control of USV and UAV, this paper combines edge computing, cooperative communication and centralized task allocation together to make decision for rescue. The simulation results show that our proposed schemes realize a significant improvement for maritime search and rescue.