Optimal Communication and Control Strategies in a Cooperative Multiagent MDP Problem

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Sudhakara, Sagar; Kartik, Dhruva; Jain, Rahul; Nayyar, Ashutosh
• 署名单位: University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0018-9286
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2024.3386454
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 6959-6966
• 关键词: costs; information sharing; Protocols; Random variables; Periodic structures; optimization; Multi-agent systems; Agents and autonomous systems; Cooperative control; multiagent systems; POMDP; stochastic optimal control

摘要

The problem of controlling cooperative multiagent systems under different models of information sharing among agents has received significant attention in the recent literature. In this article, we consider a setup where rather than committing to a fixed and nonadaptive information sharing protocol (e.g., periodic sharing or no sharing, etc.), agents can dynamically decide at each time step whether to share information with each other and incur the resulting communication cost. This setup requires a joint design of agents' communication and control strategies in order to optimize the tradeoff between communication costs and the control objective. We first show that agents can ignore a big part of their private information without compromising the system performance. We then provide a common-information-approach-based solution for the strategy optimization problem. This approach relies on constructing a fictitious partially observable markov decision process (POMDP) whose solution (obtained via a dynamic program) characterizes the optimal strategies for the agents. We extend our solution to incorporate time-varying packet-drop channels and constraints on when and how frequently agents can communicate.