Title
Not all agents are equal: scaling up distributed POMDPs for agent networks
Abstract
Many applications of networks of agents, including mobile sensor networks, unmanned air vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, involve 100s of agents acting collaboratively under uncertainty. Distributed Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems (Distributed POMDPs) are well-suited to address such applications, but so far, only limited scale-ups of up to five agents have been demonstrated. This paper escalates the scale-up, presenting an algorithm called FANS, increasing the number of agents in distributed POMDPs for the first time into double digits. FANS is founded on finite state machines (FSMs) for policy representation and expoits these FSMs to provide three key contributions: (i) Not all agents within an agent network need the same expressivity of policy representation; FANS introduces novel heuristics to automatically vary the FSM size in different agents for scaleup; (ii) FANS illustrates efficient integration of its FSM-based policy search within algorithms that exploit agent network structure; (iii) FANS provides significant speedups in policy evaluation and heuristic computations within the network algorithms by exploiting the FSMs for dynamic programming. Experimental results show not only orders of magnitude improvements over previous best known algorithms for smaller-scale domains (with similar solution quality), but also a scale-up into double digits in terms of numbers of agents.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.5555/1402383.1402453
AAMAS (1)
Keywords
Field
DocType
network algorithm,agent network,policy representation,fsm-based policy search,agent network structure,different agent,policy evaluation,double digit,mobile sensor network,fsm size,multi agent system,finite state machine,multi agent systems,finite state machines
Dynamic programming,Heuristic,Decision problem,Computer science,Markov chain,Finite-state machine,Multi-agent system,Exploit,Heuristics,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Distributed computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.85
10
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Janusz Marecki168549.06
Tapana Gupta2291.79
Pradeep Varakantham364863.05
Milind Tambe46008522.25
Makoto Yokoo53632421.99