TY - JOUR
T1 - A formal analysis of required cooperation in multi-agent planning
AU - Zhang, Yu
AU - Sreedharan, Sarath
AU - Kambhampati, Subbarao
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is supported in part by the ONR grants N00014-13-1-0176, N00014-13-1-0519 and N00014-15-1-2027, and the ARO grant W911NF-13-1-0023. The authors would also like to thank Sushovan De for help in coming up with the Burglary problem.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - It is well understood that, through cooperation, multiple agents can achieve tasks that are unachievable by a single agent. However, there are no formal characterizations of situations where cooperation is required to achieve a goal, thus warranting the application of multiple agents. In this paper, we provide such a formal characterization for multi-agent planning problems with sequential action execution. We first show that determining whether there is required cooperation (RC) is in general intractable even in this limited setting. As a result, we start our analysis with a subset of more restrictive problems where agents are homogeneous. For such problems, we identify two conditions that can cause RC. We establish that when none of these conditions hold, the problem is single-agent solvable; otherwise, we provide upper bounds on the minimum number of agents required. For the remaining problems with heterogeneous agents, we further divide them into two subsets. For one of the subsets, we propose the concept of transformer agent to reduce the number of agents to be considered which is used to improve planning performance. We implemented a planner using our theoretical results and compared it with one of the best IPC CoDMAP planners in the centralized track. Results show that our planner provides significantly improved performance on IPC CoDMAP domains.
AB - It is well understood that, through cooperation, multiple agents can achieve tasks that are unachievable by a single agent. However, there are no formal characterizations of situations where cooperation is required to achieve a goal, thus warranting the application of multiple agents. In this paper, we provide such a formal characterization for multi-agent planning problems with sequential action execution. We first show that determining whether there is required cooperation (RC) is in general intractable even in this limited setting. As a result, we start our analysis with a subset of more restrictive problems where agents are homogeneous. For such problems, we identify two conditions that can cause RC. We establish that when none of these conditions hold, the problem is single-agent solvable; otherwise, we provide upper bounds on the minimum number of agents required. For the remaining problems with heterogeneous agents, we further divide them into two subsets. For one of the subsets, we propose the concept of transformer agent to reduce the number of agents to be considered which is used to improve planning performance. We implemented a planner using our theoretical results and compared it with one of the best IPC CoDMAP planners in the centralized track. Results show that our planner provides significantly improved performance on IPC CoDMAP domains.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84989899459&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84989899459&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:84989899459
VL - 2016-January
SP - 335
EP - 343
JO - Proceedings International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS
JF - Proceedings International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS
SN - 2334-0835
T2 - 26th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS 2016
Y2 - 12 June 2016 through 17 June 2016
ER -