Publication - Analyzing Myopic Approaches for Multi-Agent Communication

Authors: Becker, Raphen; Lesser, Victor; Zilberstein, Shlomo
Title: Analyzing Myopic Approaches for Multi-Agent Communication
Abstract: Choosing when to communicate is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems. This problem becomes particularly hard when communication is constrained and each agent has different partial information about the overall situation. Although computing the exact value of communication is intractable, it has been estimated using a standard myopic assumption. However, this assumption--that communication is only possible at the present time--introduces error that can lead to poor agent behavior. We examine specific situations in which the myopic approach performs poorly and demonstrate an alternate approach that relaxes the assumption to improve the performance. The results provide an effective method for value-driven communication policies in multi-agent systems.
Keywords: Communication, Coordination, Distributed MDP, Multi-Agent Systems
Publication: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 05), pp. 550 - 557
Location: Compiegne, France
Publisher: IEEE Computer Society
Date: September 2005
Sources: PDF: /Documents/Becker_IAT05.pdf
Notes: Winner of the BEST PAPER AWARD.
Reference: Becker, Raphen; Lesser, Victor; Zilberstein, Shlomo. Analyzing Myopic Approaches for Multi-Agent Communication. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 05), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 550-557. September 2005. Winner of the BEST PAPER AWARD.
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{Becker-398,
  author    = "Raphen Becker and Victor Lesser and Shlomo
               Zilberstein",
  title     = "{Analyzing Myopic Approaches for Multi-Agent
               Communication}",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International
               Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT
               05)",
  publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",
  pages     = "550-557",
  month     = "September",
  year      = "2005",
  address   = "Compiegne, France",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/398",
}