Publication - Multi-Agent Policies: From Centralized Ones to Decentralized Ones

Authors: Xuan, Ping; Lesser, Victor
Title: Multi-Agent Policies: From Centralized Ones to Decentralized Ones
Abstract: In this paper we divide multi-agent policies into two categories: centralized ones and decentralized ones. They re•ect di•erent views of multi-agent systems and di•erent decisiontheoretic underpinnings. While the centralized policies specify the decision of the agents according to the global system state, the decentralized policies, which correspond to the decisions of situated agents, must assume only a partial knowledge of the system in each agent and must deal with communication explicitly. In this paper we relate these two types of policies by introducing a formal and systematic methodology for transforming centralized policies into a variety of decentralized policies. We introduce a set of transformation strategies, and provide a representation for discussing decentralized communication decisions. Through our experiments, we show that our methodology enables us to derive a class of interesting policies that have a range of expected utilities and amount of communication, and allows us to gain important insights into decentralized coordination strategies from a decision-theoretic perspective.
Publication: Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Vol: Part 3, pp. 1098 - 1105
Publisher: ACM Press
Date: 2002
Sources: PS: /Documents/Xuan/aamas02.ps
PDF: /Documents/aamas02.pdf
Reference: Xuan, Ping; Lesser, Victor. Multi-Agent Policies: From Centralized Ones to Decentralized Ones. Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Volume Part 3, ACM Press, pp. 1098-1105. 2002.
bibtex: 
@article{Xuan-259,
  author    = "Ping Xuan and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Multi-Agent Policies: From Centralized Ones to
               Decentralized Ones}",
  journal   = "Proceedings of the 1st International Joint
               Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
               Systems",
  volume    = "Part 3",
  publisher = "ACM Press",
  pages     = "1098-1105",
  year      = "2002",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/259",
}