Related papers: The Importance of System-Level Information in Mult…
The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…
In recent years, a significant research effort has been devoted to the design of distributed protocols for the control of multi-agent systems, as the scale and limited communication bandwidth characteristic of such systems render…
Many modern software systems are built as a set of autonomous software components (also called agents) that collaborate with each other and are situated in an environment. To keep these multiagent systems operational under abnormal…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
This paper deals with solving distributed optimization problems with equality constraints by a class of uncertain nonlinear heterogeneous dynamic multi-agent systems. It is assumed that each agent with an uncertain dynamic model has limited…
We study the mechanism design problem in the setting where agents are rewarded using information only. This problem is motivated by the increasing interest in secure multiparty computation techniques. More specifically, we consider the…
We investigate the problem of co-designing computation and communication in a multi-agent system (e.g. a sensor network or a multi-robot team). We consider the realistic setting where each agent acquires sensor data and is capable of local…
We explore the connection between an agent's decision problem and her ranking of information structures. We find that a finite amount of ordinal data on the agent's ranking of experiments is enough to identify her (finite) set of…
Multi-agent systems are designed to concurrently accomplish a diverse set of tasks at unprecedented scale. Here, the central problems faced by a system operator are to decide (i) how to divide available resources amongst the agents assigned…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
In this work we consider a generalization of the well-known multivehicle routing problem: given a network, a set of agents occupying a subset of its nodes, and a set of tasks, we seek a minimum cost sequence of movements subject to the…
Composite systems are large complex systems con- sisting of interconnected agents (subsystems). Agents in a com- posite system interact with each other towards performing an in- tended goal. Controllability is essential to achieve desired…
This paper introduces a novel approach to solve the coverage optimization problem in multi-agent systems. The proposed technique offers an optimal solution with a lower cost with respect to conventional Voronoi-based techniques by…
The maximization of submodular functions is an NP-Hard problem for certain subclasses of functions, for which a simple greedy algorithm has been shown to guarantee a solution whose quality is within 1/2 of the optimal. When this algorithm…
Conventional distributed approaches to coverage control may suffer from lack of convergence and poor performance, due to the fact that agents have limited information, especially in non-convex discrete environments. To address this issue,…
The question of what global information must distributed rational agents a-priori know about the network in order for equilibrium to be possible is researched here. Until now, distributed algorithms with rational agents have assumed that…
This paper addresses the sweep coverage problem of multi-agent systems in uncertain regions. A new formulation of distributed sweep coverage is proposed to cooperatively complete the workload in the uncertain region. Specifically, each…
In this paper, we investigate the distributed optimal control problem for a kind of nonlinear multi-agent systems. In particular,both the state and the system dynamic structures of each agent are private and can only be shared among…
We consider the one-sided matching problem, where n agents have preferences over n items, and these preferences are induced by underlying cardinal valuation functions. The goal is to match every agent to a single item so as to maximize the…