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Register a new userAn Evolutionary Approach for Optimizing Hierarchical Multi-Agent System Organization
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Added by
Han Yu
Publication date
2014
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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It has been widely recognized that the performance of a multi-agent system is highly affected by its organization. A large scale system may have billions of possible ways of organization, which makes it impractical to find an optimal choice of organization using exhaustive search methods. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm aided optimization scheme for designing hierarchical structures of multi-agent systems. We introduce a novel algorithm, called the hierarchical genetic algorithm, in which hierarchical crossover with a repair strategy and mutation of small perturbation are used. The phenotypic hierarchical structure space is translated to the genome-like array representation space, which makes the algorithm genetic-operator-literate. A case study with 10 scenarios of a hierarchical information retrieval model is provided. Our experiments have shown that competitive baseline structures which lead to the optimal organization in terms of utility can be found by the proposed algorithm during the evolutionary search. Compared with the traditional genetic operators, the newly introduced operators produced better organizations of higher utility more consistently in a variety of test cases. The proposed algorithm extends of the search processes of the state-of-the-art multi-agent organization design methodologies, and is more computationally efficient in a large search space.
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Agent technology, a new paradigm in software engineering, has received attention from research and industry since 1990s. However, it is still not used widely to date because it requires expertise on both programming and agent technology; gaps among requirements, agent design, and agent deployment also pose more difficulties. Goal Net methodology attempts to solve these issues with a goal-oriented approach that resembles human behaviours, and an agent designer that supports agent development using this philosophy. However, there are limitations on existing Goal Net Designer, the design and modelling component of the agent designer. Those limitations, including limited access, difficult deployment, inflexibility in user operations, design workflows against typical Goal Net methodology workflows, and lack of data protection, have inhibited widespread adoption of Goal Net methodology. Motivated by this, this book focuses on improvements on Goal Net Designer. In this project, Goal Net Designer is completely re-implemented using new technology with optimised software architecture and design. It allows access from all major desktop operating systems, as well as in web environment via all modern browsers. Enhancements such as refined workflows, model validation tool, access control, team collaboration tool, and link to compiler make Goal Net Designer a fully functional and powerful Integrated Development Environment. User friendliness and usability are greatly enhanced by simplifying users actions to accomplish their tasks. User behaviour logging and quantitative feedback channel are also included to allow Goal Net Designer to continuously evolve with the power of big data analytics in future. To evaluate the new Goal Net Designer, a teachable agent has been developed with the help of Goal Net Designer and the development process is illustrated in a case study.
Trust region methods are widely applied in single-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their monotonic performance-improvement guarantee at every iteration. Nonetheless, when applied in multi-agent settings, the guarantee of trust region methods no longer holds because an agents payoff is also affected by other agents adaptive behaviors. To tackle this problem, we conduct a game-theoretical analysis in the policy space, and propose a multi-agent trust region learning method (MATRL), which enables trust region optimization for multi-agent learning. Specifically, MATRL finds a stable improvement direction that is guided by the solution concept of Nash equilibrium at the meta-game level. We derive the monotonic improvement guarantee in multi-agent settings and empirically show the local convergence of MATRL to stable fixed points in the two-player rotational differential game. To test our method, we evaluate MATRL in both discrete and continuous multiplayer general-sum games including checker and switch grid worlds, multi-agent MuJoCo, and Atari games. Results suggest that MATRL significantly outperforms strong multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines.
In most multiagent applications, communication is essential among agents to coordinate their actions, and thus achieve their goal. However, communication often has a related cost that affects overall system performance. In this paper, we draw inspiration from studies of epistemic planning to develop a communication model for agents that allows them to cooperate and make communication decisions effectively within a planning task. The proposed model treats a communication process as an action that modifies the epistemic state of the team. In two simulated tasks, we evaluate whether agents can cooperate effectively and achieve higher performance using communication protocol modeled in our epistemic planning framework. Based on an empirical study conducted using search and rescue tasks with different scenarios, our results show that the proposed model improved team performance across all scenarios compared with baseline models.
The development of intelligent traffic light control systems is essential for smart transportation management. While some efforts have been made to optimize the use of individual traffic lights in an isolated way, related studies have largely ignored the fact that the use of multi-intersection traffic lights is spatially influenced and there is a temporal dependency of historical traffic status for current traffic light control. To that end, in this paper, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (STMARL) framework for effectively capturing the spatio-temporal dependency of multiple related traffic lights and control these traffic lights in a coordinating way. Specifically, we first construct the traffic light adjacency graph based on the spatial structure among traffic lights. Then, historical traffic records will be integrated with current traffic status via Recurrent Neural Network structure. Moreover, based on the temporally-dependent traffic information, we design a Graph Neural Network based model to represent relationships among multiple traffic lights, and the decision for each traffic light will be made in a distributed way by the deep Q-learning method. Finally, the experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data have demonstrated the effectiveness of our STMARL framework, which also provides an insightful understanding of the influence mechanism among multi-intersection traffic lights.
Following the remarkable success of the AlphaGO series, 2019 was a booming year that witnessed significant advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques. MARL corresponds to the learning problem in a multi-agent system in which multiple agents learn simultaneously. It is an interdisciplinary domain with a long history that includes game theory, machine learning, stochastic control, psychology, and optimisation. Although MARL has achieved considerable empirical success in solving real-world games, there is a lack of a self-contained overview in the literature that elaborates the game theoretical foundations of modern MARL methods and summarises the recent advances. In fact, the majority of existing surveys are outdated and do not fully cover the recent developments since 2010. In this work, we provide a monograph on MARL that covers both the fundamentals and the latest developments in the research frontier. The goal of our monograph is to provide a self-contained assessment of the current state-of-the-art MARL techniques from a game theoretical perspective. We expect this work to serve as a stepping stone for both new researchers who are about to enter this fast-growing domain and existing domain experts who want to obtain a panoramic view and identify new directions based on recent advances.
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