Related papers: The price of decentralization in managing engineer…

Efficient task scheduling in large-scale distributed systems presents significant challenges due to dynamic workloads, heterogeneous resources, and competing quality-of-service requirements. Traditional centralized approaches face…

The state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have provided promising solutions to a variety of complex problems. Yet, these methods all assume that agents perform synchronized primitive-action executions so that…

Decision-making for engineering systems can be efficiently formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) or a Partially Observable MDP (POMDP). Typical MDP and POMDP solution procedures utilize offline knowledge about the environment and…

This paper proposes an effective and novel multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based method for solving the joint virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing (P&R), where multiple service requests with differentiated…

Determination of inspection and maintenance policies for minimizing long-term risks and costs in deteriorating engineering environments constitutes a complex optimization problem. Major computational challenges include the (i) curse of…

In decentralized multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL), communication can help agents to gain a better understanding of the environment to better coordinate their behaviors. Nevertheless, communication may involve uncertainty,…

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the overlap of small cells and the macro cell causes severe cross-tier interference. Although there exist some approaches to address this problem, they usually require global channel state information,…

Targets search and detection encompasses a variety of decision problems such as coverage, surveillance, search, observing and pursuit-evasion along with others. In this paper we develop a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)…

Reinforcement learning algorithms require a large amount of samples; this often limits their real-world applications on even simple tasks. Such a challenge is more outstanding in multi-agent tasks, as each step of operation is more costly…

We discuss the problem of decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in this work. In our setting, the global state, action, and reward are assumed to be fully observable, while the local policy is protected as privacy by each…

In edge computing systems, autonomous agents must make fast local decisions while competing for shared resources. Existing MARL methods often resume to centralized critics or frequent communication, which fail under limited observability…

In the field of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the standard paradigm is the use of centralised training and decentralised execution where a central critic conditions the policies of the cooperative agents based on a…

Recently, distributed controller architectures have been quickly gaining popularity in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). However, the use of distributed controllers introduces a new and important Request Dispatching (RD) problem with the…

This study investigates how Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) can improve dynamic pricing strategies in supply chains, particularly in contexts where traditional ERP systems rely on static, rule-based approaches that overlook…

Decentralized cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) can be a versatile learning framework, particularly in scenarios where centralized training is either not possible or not practical. One of the critical challenges in…

Intraday surgical scheduling is a multi-objective decision problem under uncertainty-balancing elective throughput, urgent and emergency demand, delays, sequence-dependent setups, and overtime. We formulate the problem as a cooperative…

In this paper, a novel Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach, Multi-Agent Continuous Dynamic Policy Gradient (MACDPP) was proposed to tackle the issues of limited capability and sample efficiency in various scenarios controlled…

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has gained significant interest in recent years, enabling sequential decision-making across multiple agents in various domains. However, most existing explanation methods focus on centralized MARL,…

Adaptive Mixed-Criticality (AMC) is a fixed-priority preemptive scheduling algorithm for mixed-criticality hard real-time systems. It dominates many other scheduling algorithms for mixed-criticality systems, but does so at the cost of…

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a widely used technique for optimization in decentralised control problems. However, most applications of MARL are in static environments, and are not suitable when agent behaviour and…