loading...
 This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1 (AAMAS'04)
Decentralized Markov Decision Processes with Event-Driven Interactions
New York City, New York, USA
July 19-July 23
ISBN: 0-7695-2092-8
Raphen Becker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Shlomo Zilberstein, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Decentralized MDPs provide a powerful formal framework for planning in multi-agent systems, but the complexity of the model limits its usefulness. We study in this paper a class of DEC-MDPs that restricts the interactions between the agents to a structured, event-driven dependency. These dependencies can model locking a shared resource or temporal enabling constraints, both of which arise frequently in practice. The complexity of this class of problems is shown to be no harder than exponential in the number of states and doubly exponential in the number of dependencies. Since the number of dependencies is much smaller than the number of states for many problems, this is significantly better than the doubly exponential (in the state space) complexity of DEC-MDPs. We also demonstrate how an algorithm we previously developed can be used to solve problems in this class both optimally and approximately. Experimental work indicates that this solution technique is significantly faster than a naive policy search approach.
Citation:
Raphen Becker, Shlomo Zilberstein, Victor Lesser, "Decentralized Markov Decision Processes with Event-Driven Interactions," aamas, vol. 1, pp.302-309, Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1 (AAMAS'04), 2004
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.