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Resource-Aware Junction Trees for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination

Resource-Aware Junction Trees for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination
Resource-Aware Junction Trees for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination
In this paper we address efficient decentralised coordination of cooperative multi-agent systems by taking into account the actual computation and communication capabilities of the agents. We consider coordination problems that can be framed as Distributed Constraint Optimisation Problems, and as such, are suitable to be deployed on large scale multi-agent systems such as sensor networks or multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. Specifically, we focus on techniques that exploit structural independence among agents’ actions to provide optimal solutions to the coordination problem, and, in particular, we use the Generalized Distributive Law (GDL) algorithm. In this settings, we propose a novel resource aware heuristic to build junction trees and to schedule GDL computations across the agents. Our goal is to minimise the total running time of the coordination process, rather than the theoretical complexity of the computation, by explicitly considering the computation and communication capabilities of agents. We evaluate our proposed approach against DPOP, RDPI and a centralized solver on a number of benchmark coordination problems, and show that our approach is able to provide optimal solutions for DCOPs faster than previous approaches. Specifically, in the settings considered, when resources are scarce our approach is up to three times faster than DPOP (which proved to be the best among the competitors in our settings).
363-370
Stefanovitch, Nicolas
31ddbc56-e50b-478c-a78c-fada5e84745f
Farinelli, Alessandro
d2f26070-f403-4cae-b712-7097cb2e3fc6
Rogers, Alex
f9130bc6-da32-474e-9fab-6c6cb8077fdc
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Stefanovitch, Nicolas
31ddbc56-e50b-478c-a78c-fada5e84745f
Farinelli, Alessandro
d2f26070-f403-4cae-b712-7097cb2e3fc6
Rogers, Alex
f9130bc6-da32-474e-9fab-6c6cb8077fdc
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30

Stefanovitch, Nicolas, Farinelli, Alessandro, Rogers, Alex and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2011) Resource-Aware Junction Trees for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination. The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011), Taipei, Taiwan. 02 - 06 May 2011. pp. 363-370 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

In this paper we address efficient decentralised coordination of cooperative multi-agent systems by taking into account the actual computation and communication capabilities of the agents. We consider coordination problems that can be framed as Distributed Constraint Optimisation Problems, and as such, are suitable to be deployed on large scale multi-agent systems such as sensor networks or multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. Specifically, we focus on techniques that exploit structural independence among agents’ actions to provide optimal solutions to the coordination problem, and, in particular, we use the Generalized Distributive Law (GDL) algorithm. In this settings, we propose a novel resource aware heuristic to build junction trees and to schedule GDL computations across the agents. Our goal is to minimise the total running time of the coordination process, rather than the theoretical complexity of the computation, by explicitly considering the computation and communication capabilities of agents. We evaluate our proposed approach against DPOP, RDPI and a centralized solver on a number of benchmark coordination problems, and show that our approach is able to provide optimal solutions for DCOPs faster than previous approaches. Specifically, in the settings considered, when resources are scarce our approach is up to three times faster than DPOP (which proved to be the best among the competitors in our settings).

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More information

Published date: 2011
Additional Information: Event Dates: 2-6 May 2011
Venue - Dates: The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011), Taipei, Taiwan, 2011-05-02 - 2011-05-06
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 272002
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/272002
PURE UUID: c45892be-a773-4b75-a4e2-03a3bc52b9e7

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Date deposited: 10 Feb 2011 09:31
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:44

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Contributors

Author: Nicolas Stefanovitch
Author: Alessandro Farinelli
Author: Alex Rogers
Author: Nicholas R. Jennings

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