Resource-Aware Junction Trees for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination
OA Location
Author(s)
Stefanovitch, Nicolas
Farinelli, Alessandro
Rogers, Alex
Jennings, Nicholas R
Type
Conference 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).
Date Issued
2011
Citation
2011, pp.363-370
Start Page
363
End Page
370
Copyright Statement
© 2011, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/272002/
Source
The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011)
Source Place
Taipei, Taiwan
Notes
Event Dates: 2-6 May 2011
Publication Status
Unpublished
Start Date
2011-05-02
Finish Date
2011-05-06