AED: An Anytime Evolutionary DCOP Algorithm
Abstract
Evolutionary optimization is a generic population-based metaheuristic that can be adapted to solve a wide variety of optimization problems and has proven very effective for combinatorial optimization problems. However, the potential of this metaheuristic has not been utilized in Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs), a well-known class of combinatorial optimization problems prevalent in Multi-Agent Systems. In this paper, we present a novel population-based algorithm, Anytime Evolutionary DCOP (AED), that uses evolutionary optimization to solve DCOPs. In AED, the agents cooperatively construct an initial set of random solutions and gradually improve them through a new mechanism that considers an optimistic approximation of local benefits. Moreover, we present a new anytime update mechanism for AED that identifies the best among a distributed set of candidate solutions and notifies all the agents when a new best is found. In our theoretical analysis, we prove that AED is anytime. Finally, we present empirical results indicating AED outperforms the state-of-the-art DCOP algorithms in terms of solution quality.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1909.06254,
title = {AED: An Anytime Evolutionary DCOP Algorithm},
author = {Saaduddin Mahmud and Moumita Choudhury and Md. Mosaddek Khan and Long Tran-Thanh and Nicholas R. Jennings},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.06254},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
9 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Appeared in the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2020)