Introducing Communication in Dis-POMDPs with Finite State Machines

Distributed Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems (DisPOMDPs) are emerging as a popular approach for modeling sequential decision making in teams operating under uncertainty. To achieve coherent behaviours of agents, performing appropriate runtime communication is essential. Thus, there have been many works on the run-time communication schemes in Dis-POMDPs. Also, a Finite State Machine (FSM) is a popular representation for describing a local policy that works in a very long or an infinite time horizon. In this paper, we examine a run-time communication scheme when the local policy of each agent is represented as an FSM. In this scheme, the meaning of each message is not predefined; it is given implicitly by the interaction between local policies. We propose an iterative-improvement type algorithm that searches for a joint policy where run-time communication incurs some cost. Thus, agents use run-time communication only when doing so is cost-effective. Interestingly, our al...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IAT
• Authors: Yuki Iwanari, Makoto Tasaki, Makoto Yokoo, Atsushi Iwasaki, Yuko Sakurai
• Keywords: IAT 2009, Intelligent Agent, Joint Policy, Run-time Communication, Run-time Communication Scheme