AED: An Anytime Evolutionary DCOP Algorithm

Mahmud, Saaduddin, Choudhury, Moumita, Khan, Md. Mosaddek, Tran-Thanh, Long and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2020) AED: An Anytime Evolutionary DCOP Algorithm. An, B, Yorke-Smith, N, Fallah Seghrouch, El and Sukthank, G (eds.) In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2020. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). pp. 825-833 .

Abstract

Evolutionary optimization is a generic population-based metaheuristic that can be adapted to solve a wide variety of optimization problems and has proven very effective for combinatorial optimization problems. However, the potential of this metaheuristic has not been utilized in Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs), a well-known class of combinatorial optimization problems prevalent in Multi-Agent Systems. In this paper, we present a novel population-based algorithm, Anytime Evolutionary DCOP (AED), that uses evolutionary optimization to solve DCOPs. In AED, the agents cooperatively construct an initial set of random solutions and gradually improve them through a new mechanism that considers an optimistic approximation of local benefits. Moreover, we present a new anytime update mechanism for AED that identifies the best among a distributed set of candidate solutions and notifies all the agents when a new best is found. In our theoretical analysis, we prove that AED is anytime. Finally, we present empirical results indicating AED outperforms the state-of-the-art DCOP algorithms in terms of solution quality.

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Contributors

Author: Long Tran-Thanh

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