Team formation and communication restrictions in collectives

13 years 9 months ago

Download ti.arc.nasa.gov

A collective of agents often needs to maximize a “world utility” function which rates the performance of an entire system, while subject to communication restrictions among the agents. Such communication restrictions make it difﬁcult for agents which try to pursue their own “private” utilities to take actions that also help optimize the world utility. Team formation presents a solution to this problem, where by joining other agents, an agent can signiﬁcantly increase its knowledge about the environment and improve its chances of both optimizing its own utility and that its doing so will contribute to the world utility. In this article we show how utilities that have been previously shown to be eﬀective in collectives can be modiﬁed to be more eﬀective in domains with moderate communication restrictions resulting in performance improvements of up to 75%. Additionally we show that even severe communication constraints can be overcome by forming teams where each agent o...

Adrian K. Agogino, Kagan Tumer

Real-time Traffic