{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Exploiting Separability in Multiagent Planning with Continuous-State MDPs (Extended Abstract)","authors":[{"name":"Jilles Steeve Dibangoye","slug":"jilles-steeve-dibangoye","given":"Jilles Steeve","family":"Dibangoye","affiliation":""},{"name":"Christopher Amato","slug":"christopher-amato","given":"Christopher","family":"Amato","affiliation":""},{"name":"Olivier Buffet","slug":"olivier-buffet","given":"Olivier","family":"Buffet","affiliation":""},{"name":"François Charpillet","slug":"francois-charpillet","given":"François","family":"Charpillet","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) provide a general model for decision-making under uncertainty in cooperative decentralized settings, but are difficult to solve optimally (NEXP-Complete). As a new way of solving these problems, we recently introduced a method for transforming a Dec-POMDP into a continuous-state deterministic MDP with a piecewise-linear and convex value function. This new Dec-POMDP formulation, which we call an occupancy MDP, allows powerful POMDP and continuous-state MDP methods to be used for the first time. However, scalability remains limited when the number of agents or problem variables becomes large. In this paper, we show that, under certain separability conditions of the optimal value function, the scalability of this approach can increase considerably. This separability is present when there is locality of interaction between agents, which can be exploited to improve performance. Unlike most previous methods, the novel continuous-state MDP algorithm retains optimality and convergence guarantees. Results show that the extension using separability can scale to a large number of agents and domain variables while maintaining optimality.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/605","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0605.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/605.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/bibtex/605","volume":{"slug":"2015","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2015","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/","year":2015,"location":"Buenos Aires, Argentina","dates":"25–31 July 2015","editors":"Qiang Yang and Michael Wooldridge","isbn":"978-1-57735-738-4","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Best Papers from Sister Conferences Track","track":"Best Papers from Sister Conferences Track","number":605,"pages":{"first":4254,"last":4259},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}