Publication - Compact Mathematical Programs For DEC-MDPs With Structured Agent Interactions

Authors: Mostafa, Hala; Lesser, Victor
Title: Compact Mathematical Programs For DEC-MDPs With Structured Agent Interactions
Abstract: To deal with the prohibitive complexity of calculating policies in Decentralized MDPs, researchers have proposed models that exploit structured agent interactions. Settings where most agent actions are independent except for few actions that affect the transitions and/or rewards of other agents can be modeled using Event-Driven Interactions with Complex Rewards (EDI-CR). Finding the optimal joint policy can be formulated as an optimization problem. However, existing formulations are too verbose and/or lack optimality guarantees. We propose a compact Mixed Integer Linear Program formulation of EDI-CR instances. The key insight is that most action sequences of a group of agents have the same effect on a given agent. This allows us to treat these sequences similarly and use fewer variables. Experiments show that our formulation is more compact and leads to faster solution times and better solutions than existing formulations.
Keywords: Coordination, Distributed MDP, Multi-Agent Systems, Uncertainty
Publication: Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011), pp. 523 - 530
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Date: July 2011
Sources: PDF: /Documents/halauai11.pdf
Reference: Mostafa, Hala; Lesser, Victor. Compact Mathematical Programs For DEC-MDPs With Structured Agent Interactions. Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011), pp. 523-530. July 2011.
bibtex: 
@article{Mostafa-508,
  author    = "Hala Mostafa and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Compact Mathematical Programs For DEC-MDPs With
               Structured Agent Interactions}",
  journal   = "Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Uncertainty
               in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011)",
  pages     = "523-530",
  month     = "July",
  year      = "2011",
  address   = "Barcelona, Spain",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/508",
}