Title :
Convergence guarantees for a decentralized algorithm achieving pareto optimality
Author :
Menon, Ashok ; Baras, John S.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Abstract :
We consider N agents, each picking actions from a finite set and receiving a payoff according to its individual utility function that may depend on the actions picked by others. An agent has no knowledge about the functional form of its utility and can only measure its instantaneous value. It is assumed that all agents pick actions and receive payoffs synchronously. For this setting, a fully decentralized iterative algorithm for achieving Pareto optimality i.e. picking actions that maximize the sum of all utilities was proposed by Marden et. al. in [1] that lacks convergence guarantees. By scheduling a certain noise parameter to go to zero along iterations of this algorithm, conditions that guarantee convergence in probability are derived in this paper.
Keywords :
Pareto optimisation; convergence; game theory; probability; set theory; utility theory; N agents; Pareto optimality; action picking; convergence guarantees; decentralized iterative algorithm; finite set; noise parameter scheduling; payoff receiving; probability; utility function; Algorithm design and analysis; Annealing; Convergence; Games; Markov processes; Resistance; Turbines;
Conference_Titel :
American Control Conference (ACC), 2013
Conference_Location :
Washington, DC
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-0177-7
DOI :
10.1109/ACC.2013.6580118