When Information Does Not Deliver: The Service-Capacity Cost of Rigid Roles in Energy-Constrained Multi-Agent Foraging

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This paper investigates whether dedicated scouting roles improve decentralized search, pickup, and delivery in warehouse environments where object locations are unknown and agents must balance exploration, transport, and communication costs. We compare heterogeneous spatial roles (HSR), which separate exploration from transport, with generalist exploration strategies. By keeping the sensing, allocation, routing, and communication mechanisms identical across policies, we measure the specific cost of rigid role assignment. Results show that assigning agents exclusively to scouting increases resource discovery but often reduces overall delivery performance, as the additional information does not compensate for the loss of transport capacity. Allowing scouts to retain transport capabilities preserves exploratory behavior while improving delivery performance. Furthermore, lightweight communication and stigmergic coordination are beneficial only when information can effectively spread through the team. These findings suggest that soft specialization is more effective than rigid role assignment, enabling agents to explore effectively without sacrificing service performance within the range of team sizes and conditions tested here.