About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
Paper
Introducing communication in Dis-POMDPs with locality of interaction
Abstract
The Networked Distributed POMDPs (ND-POMDPs) can model multiagent systems in uncertain domains and have begun to scale-up the number of agents. However, prior work in ND-POMDPs has failed to address communication. Without communication, the size of a local policy at each agent within the ND-POMDPs grows exponentially in the time horizon. To overcome this problem, we extend existing algorithms so that agents periodically communicate their observation and action histories with each other. After communication, agents can start from new synchronized belief state. Thus, we can avoid the exponential growth in the size of local policies at agents. Furthermore, we introduce an idea that is similar to the Point-based Value Iteration algorithm to approximate the value function with a fixed number of representative points. Our experimental results show that we can obtain much longer policies than existing algorithms as long as the interval between communications is small. © 2010 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.