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Towards robust teams with many agents

Agents in deployed multi­agent systems monitor other agents to coordinate and col­ laborate robustly. However, as the number of agents monitored is scaled up, two key challenges arise: (i) the number of monitoring hypotheses to be considered can grow exponentially in the number of agents; and (ii) agents become physically and logically unconnected (unobservable) to their peers. This paper examines these challenges in teams of cooperating agents, focusing on a monitoring task that is of particular impor­ tance to robust teamwork: detecting disagreements among team­members. We present YOYO, a highly scalable disagreement­detection algorithm which guarantees sound detection in time linear in the number of agents despite the exponential number of hy­ potheses. In addition, we present new upper bounds about the number of agents that must be monitored in a team to guarantee disagreement detection. Both YOYO and the new bounds are explored analytically and empirically in thousands of monitoring problems, scaled to thousands of agents.

Citation

G. Kaminka, M. Bowling. "Towards robust teams with many agents". Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), pp 739-736, July 2002.

Keywords:  
Category: In Conference

BibTeX

@incollection{Kaminka+Bowling:AAMAS02,
  author = {Gal Kaminka and Michael Bowling},
  title = {Towards robust teams with many agents},
  Pages = {739-736},
  booktitle = {Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
    (AAMAS)},
  year = 2002,
}

Last Updated: March 09, 2007
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