Integrating Decision Sharing with Prediction in Decentralized Planning for Multi-Agent Coordination under Uncertainty
Integrating Decision Sharing with Prediction in Decentralized Planning for Multi-Agent Coordination under Uncertainty
Minglong Li, Wenjing Yang, Zhongxuan Cai, Shaowu Yang, Ji Wang
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 450-456.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/64
The performance of decentralized multi-agent systems tends to benefit from information sharing and its effective utilization. However, too much or unnecessary sharing may hinder the performance due to the delay, instability and additional overhead of communications. Aiming to a satisfiable coordination performance, one would prefer the cost of communications as less as possible. In this paper, we propose an approach for improving the sharing utilization by integrating information sharing with prediction in decentralized planning. We present a novel planning algorithm by combining decision sharing and prediction based on decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search called Dec-MCTS-SP. Each agent grows a search tree guided by the rewards calculated by the joint actions, which can not only be sampled from the shared probability distributions over action sequences, but also be predicted by a sufficiently-accurate and computationally-cheap heuristics-based method. Besides, several policies including sparse and discounted UCT and DIY-bonus are leveraged for performance improvement. We have implemented Dec-MCTS-SP in the case study on multi-agent information gathering under threat and uncertainty, which is formulated as Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP). The factored belief vectors are integrated into Dec-MCTS-SP to handle the uncertainty. Comparing with the random, auction-based algorithm and Dec-MCTS, the evaluation shows that Dec-MCTS-SP can reduce communication cost significantly while still achieving a surprisingly higher coordination performance.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Coordination and Cooperation
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning
Planning and Scheduling: Distributed;Multi-agent Planning