{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Sufficient Plan-Time Statistics for Decentralized POMDPs","authors":[{"name":"Frans A. Oliehoek","slug":"frans-a-oliehoek","given":"Frans A.","family":"Oliehoek","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Optimal decentralized decision making in a team of cooperative agents as formalized by decentralized POMDPs is a notoriously hard problem. A major obstacle is that the agents do not have access to a sufficient statistic during execution, which means that they need to base their actions on their histories of observations. A consequence is that even during off-line planning the choice of decision rules for different stages is tightly interwoven: decisions of earlier stages affect how to act optimally at later stages, and the optimal value function for a stage is known to have a dependence on the decisions made up to that point. This paper makes a contribution to the theory of decentralized POMDPs by showing how this dependence on the 'past joint policy' can be replaced by a sufficient statistic. These results are extended to the case of k-step delayed communication. The paper investigates the practical implications, as well as the effectiveness of a new pruning technique for MAA* methods, in a number of benchmark problems and discusses future avenues of research opened by these contributions.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/53","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/0053.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/53.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/bibtex/53","volume":{"slug":"2013","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2013","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/","year":2013,"location":"Beijing, China","dates":"3–9 August 2013","editors":"Francesca Rossi","isbn":"978-1-57735-633-2","publisher":"AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":53,"pages":{"first":302,"last":307},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}