Publication - Formal Modeling of Communication Decisions in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems

Authors: Xuan, Ping, Lesser, Victor, Zilberstein, Shlomo
Title: Formal Modeling of Communication Decisions in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems
Abstract: When collaborative agents cannot observe the global state of an uncertain environment, they must communicate in order to achieve their common goals, which is evaluated through a global utility function. We develop a multiagent extension to Markov decision processes in which communication is an explicit action that incurs a cost. Thus, agents have to decide not only which local action to perform, but also whether it is worthwhile to perform a communication action. This framework provides a foundation for a formal study of agent coordination policies and provides both motivation and insight to the design of heuristic approaches. An example problem is studied under this framework and its implications to coordination are discussed.
Keywords: Distributed MDP, Multi-Agent Systems
Publication: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Game Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents (GTDT 2000)
Date: January 2000
Sources: PDF: /Documents/xuan00formal.pdf
Reference: Xuan, Ping, Lesser, Victor, Zilberstein, Shlomo. Formal Modeling of Communication Decisions in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Game Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents (GTDT 2000). January 2000.
bibtex: 
@article{Xuan-191,
  author    = "Ping Xuan and Victor Lesser and Shlomo Zilberstein",
  title     = "{Formal Modeling of Communication Decisions in
               Cooperative Multi-agent Systems}",
  journal   = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Game
               Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents (GTDT
               2000)",
  month     = "January",
  year      = "2000",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/191",
}