Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Agent Interactions In Decentralized Environments, Martin William Allen

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The decentralized Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) is a powerful formal model for studying multiagent problems where cooperative, coordinated action is optimal, but each agent acts based on local data alone. Unfortunately, it is known that Dec-POMDPs are fundamentally intractable: they are NEXP-complete in the worst case, and have been empirically observed to be beyond feasible optimal solution.

To get around these obstacles, researchers have focused on special classes of the general Dec-POMDP problem, restricting the degree to which agent actions can interact with one another. In some cases, it has been proven that these sorts of structured forms of interaction …