Publication - A Framework for Meta-level Control in Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Raja, Anita; Lesser, Victor
Title: A Framework for Meta-level Control in Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: Sophisticated agents operating in open environments must make complex real-time control decisions on scheduling and coordination of domain activities. These decisions are made in the context of limited resources and uncertainty about the outcomes of activities. Many efficient architectures and algorithms that support these computation-intensive activities have been developed and studied. However, none of these architectures explicitly reason about the consumption of time and other resources by these activities, which may degrade an agent‘s performance. The problem of sequencing execution and computational activities while reasoning about resource contention in the process, is the meta-level control problem for a resource-bounded rational agent. In this paper we show that meta-level control with bounded computational overhead allows complex agents to solve problems more efficiently than current approaches in dynamic open multi-agent environments. We also show that meta-level control is computationally feasible through the use of an abstract representation of the agent state. This abstraction concisely captures critical information necessary for decision making while bounding the cost of meta-level control and is appropriate for use in automatically learning the meta-level control policies.
Keywords: Agent Control, Learning, MDP, Multi-Agent Systems, Planning, Real Time, Resource Bounded
Publication: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Vol: 15, Num: 2, pp. 147 - 196
Publisher: Springer
Date: October 2007
Sources: PDF: /Documents/Raja-AAMAS07.pdf
HTML: http://www.springerlink.com/content/3721815268763445/
Notes: (An earlier version is available as University of Massachusetts Computer Science Technical Report 2004-094, at: http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~anraja/PAPERS/UM-CS-2004-094.pdf )
Reference: Raja, Anita; Lesser, Victor. A Framework for Meta-level Control in Multi-Agent Systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Volume 15, Number 2, Springer, pp. 147-196. October 2007. (An earlier version is available as University of Massachusetts Computer Science Technical Report 2004-094, at: http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~anraja/PAPERS/UM-CS-2004-094.pdf )
bibtex: 
@article{Raja-380,
  author    = "Anita Raja and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{A Framework for Meta-level Control in Multi-Agent
               Systems}",
  journal   = "Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems",
  volume    = "15",
  number    = "2",
  publisher = "Springer",
  pages     = "147-196",
  month     = "October",
  year      = "2007",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/380",
}