Designing games to handle coupled constraints

The central goal in multiagent systems is to design local control laws for the individual agents to ensure that the emergent global behavior is desirable with respect to a given system level objective. In many systems, such as cooperative robotics or distributed power control, the design of these local control algorithms is further complicated by additional coupled constraints on the agents' actions. There are several approaches in the existing literature for designing such algorithms stemming from classical optimization theory; however, many of these approaches are not suitable for implementation in multiagent systems. This paper seeks to address the design of such algorithms using the field of game theory. Among other things, this design choice requires defining a local utility function for each decision maker in the system. This paper seeks to address the degree to which utility design can be effective for dealing with these coupled constraints. In particular, is it possible to design local agent utility functions such that all pure Nash equilibrium of the unconstrained game (i) optimize the given system level objective and (ii) satisfy the given coupled constraint. This design would greatly simplify the distributed control algorithms by eliminating the need to explicitly consider the constraints. Unfortunately, we illustrate that designing utility functions within the standard game theoretic framework is not suitable for this design objective. However, we demonstrate that by adding an additional state variable in the game environment, i.e., moving towards state based games, we can satisfy these performance criteria by utility design. We focus on the problem of consensus control to illustrate these results

The first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010)

Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between people and automated agents we organized the first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). The purpose of the competition is to facilitate the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. The competition was based on the Genius environment, which is a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. The first competition was held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-10) and was comprised of seven teams. This paper presents an overview of the competition, as well as general and contrasting approaches towards negotiation strategies that were adopted by the participants of the competition. Based on analysis in post--tournament experiments, the paper also attempts to provide some insights with regard to effective approaches towards the design of negotiation strategies

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

CURRENT TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN DISTRIBUTED CONTROL SYSTEMS – AN OVERVIEW

In this paper, innovations in the field of distributed control systems have been considered. Without any claim for completeness, a short summary on current trends in this area has been provided. A special attention is paid to application of blockchain technologies in distributed control systems, game theoretical approach for distributed control applications, and advantages of distributed control for power systems. Also, one of the main issues of modern distributed control systems – cybersecurity has been considered