Best Effort Workload Disparity Minimization in Multi-Agent Systems With Capacity Constraints

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Oliva, Gabriele; Charalambous, Themistoklis; Faramondi, Luca; Setola, Roberto; Gasparri, Andrea
• 署名单位: University Campus Bio-Medico - Rome Italy; University of Cyprus; University Campus Bio-Medico - Rome Italy; Roma Tre University
• 刊物名称: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0018-9286
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2022.3214058
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 4998-5005
• 关键词: Cooperative multi-agent systems; Distributed algorithms; load balancing

摘要

In this article, we propose a load balancing problem formulation where agents cooperate with the aim of simultaneously minimizing both the workload disparity among the agents and the overall workload transfer, under network capacity constraints. Notably, in our computational setting, the network is not just a device for the distributed solution of an optimization problem; on the contrary, the problem shares the same sparsity pattern as the network, and this aspect allows us to solve it without the need for the agents to store large amount of data. In particular, while the load balancing process occurs over directed links, agents' communication is assumed to be bidirectional. For this optimization setting, first, an optimality condition is derived; then, a provably convergent distributed algorithm to compute the optimal solution is developed, and an upper bound on the convergence rate is characterized. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the validity and performance of our theoretical findings.