Decision-Making Policies for Heterogeneous Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems with Safety Constraints

Zhang, Ruohan; Yu, Yue; Chamie, Mahmoud El; Açikmese, Behçet; Ballard, Dana H.

Decision-Making Policies for Heterogeneous Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems with Safety Constraints

Ruohan Zhang, Yue Yu, Mahmoud El Chamie, Behçet Açikmese, Dana H. Ballard

Download BibTeX Cite

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Pages 546-552.

Abstract

This paper studies a decision-making problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with safety density constraints. An individual agent's decision-making problem is modeled by the standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation. However, an important special case occurs when the MDP states may have limited capacities, hence upper bounds on the expected number of agents in each state are imposed. We refer to these upper bound constraints as safety constraints. If agents follow unconstrained policies (policies that do not impose the safety constraints), the safety constraints might be violated. In this paper, we devise algorithms that provide safe decision-making policies. The set of safe decision policies can be shown to be convex, and hence the policy synthesis is tractable via reliable and fast Interior Point Method (IPM) algorithms. We evaluate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms first using a simple MDP, and then using a dynamic traffic assignment problem. The numerical results demonstrate that safe decision-making algorithms in this paper significantly outperform other baselines.

Ruohan Zhang, Yue Yu, Mahmoud El Chamie, Behçet Açikmese, and Dana H. Ballard. 2016. Decision-Making Policies for Heterogeneous Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems with Safety Constraints. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-16. IJCAI, 546–552. https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/84

@inproceedings{ijcai2016p84,
  title     = {Decision-Making Policies for Heterogeneous Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems with Safety Constraints},
  author    = {Zhang, Ruohan and Yu, Yue and Chamie, Mahmoud El and Açikmese, Behçet and Ballard, Dana H.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-16}},
  publisher = {AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Subbarao Kambhampati},
  pages     = {546--552},
  year      = {2016},
  month     = {7},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/84},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Decision-Making Policies for Heterogeneous Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems with Safety Constraints
AU  - Zhang, Ruohan
AU  - Yu, Yue
AU  - Chamie, Mahmoud El
AU  - Açikmese, Behçet
AU  - Ballard, Dana H.
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-16
PB  - AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2016
SP  - 546
EP  - 552
UR  - https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/84
ER  -