Craig Boutilier
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, CANADA, V6T 1Z4
email: cebly@cs.ubc.ca
Abstract
Coordination of agent activities is a key problem in multiagent systems.
Set in a larger decision theoretic context, the existence of coordination
problems leads to difficulty in
evaluating the utility of a situation.
This in turn makes defining
optimal policies for sequential decision processes problematic.
We propose a method for solving
sequential multiagent decision problems by allowing agents to reason
explicitly about specific coordination mechanisms. We define
an extension of value iteration in which the system's state space is
augmented with the state of the coordination mechanism adopted,
allowing agents to reason about the
short and long run prospects for coordination, the long term
consequences of (mis)coordination, and make decisions to engage or
avoid coordination problems based on expected value. We also illustrate
the benefits of mechanism generalization.
Appeared, IJCAI-99
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