Title :
A Rich Communication Model in Opportunistic Decentralized Decision Making
Author :
Beynier, Aurélie ; Mouaddib, Abdel-Illah
Author_Institution :
LIP6, Univ. Paris 6, Paris, France
fDate :
Aug. 31 2010-Sept. 3 2010
Abstract :
Communication is a natural way to improve coordination in multi-agent systems under decentralized control. It allows the agents to exchange local information, to increase their observability on the system and thus leading to higher performance. Recent works dealing with decentralized control in cooperative multiagent systems have shown a great interest in Decentralized Markov Decision Processes (DEC-MDPs). However, communication models that are proposed in DEC-MDPs make strong assumptions which seldom hold in realistic multiagent systems where the execution of the agents may be asynchronous, communication is time and resource consuming and may be restricted by temporal constraints. In this paper we propose an approach that allows us to formalize more complex and realistic communication decisions in DEC-MDPs with interaction graph. We assume a communication model where, at each decision step, each agent must be able to decide to communicate or not, which information to communicate and to whom. In order to make such decisions, we extend one of the most scalable decentralized decision model, the DEC-MDP with opportunity cost (OC-DEC-MDP). This new decision model allows us to assess the value of making decisions on when and what communicating and to whom, and to save the performance of OC-DEC-MDPs.
Keywords :
Markov processes; decentralised control; decision making; graph theory; multi-agent systems; cooperative multi-agent systems; decentralized Markov decision processes; decentralized control; interaction graph; opportunistic decentralized decision making; rich communication model; Decision making; Delay; Markov processes; Observability; Probabilistic logic; Silicon; Uncertainty; Markov Decision Processes; Multi-Agent Coordination Techniques; Multi-Agent Planning; Planning under uncertainty;
Conference_Titel :
Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Toronto, ON
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-8482-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-0-7695-4191-4
DOI :
10.1109/WI-IAT.2010.41