A hybrid approach to multi-agent decision-making

Abstract. In the aftermath of a large-scale disaster, agents’ decisions derive from self-interested (e.g. survival), common-good (e.g. victims’ rescue) and teamwork (e.g. fire extinction) motivations. However, current decision-theoretic models are either purely individual or purely collective and find it difficult to deal with motivational attitudes; on the other hand, mental-state based models find it difficult to deal with uncertainty. We propose a hybrid, CvI-JI, approach that combines: i) collective ‘versus’ individual (CvI) decisions, founded on the Markov decision process (MDP) quantitative evaluation of joint-actions, and ii) joint-intentions (JI) formulation of teamwork, founded on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture of general mental-state based reasoning. The CvI-JI evaluation explores the performance’s improvement during the process of learning a coordination policy in a partially observable stochastic domain.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Paulo Trigo, Helder Coelho
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Current Decision-theoretic Models, ECAI 2008, Markov Decision Process, Mental-state Based Models