3,526 research outputs found
Optimal Opinion Control: The Campaign Problem
Opinion dynamics is nowadays a very common field of research. In this article
we formulate and then study a novel, namely strategic perspective on such
dynamics: There are the usual normal agents that update their opinions, for
instance according the well-known bounded confidence mechanism. But,
additionally, there is at least one strategic agent. That agent uses opinions
as freely selectable strategies to get control on the dynamics: The strategic
agent of our benchmark problem tries, during a campaign of a certain length, to
influence the ongoing dynamics among normal agents with strategically placed
opinions (one per period) in such a way, that, by the end of the campaign, as
much as possible normals end up with opinions in a certain interval of the
opinion space. Structurally, such a problem is an optimal control problem. That
type of problem is ubiquitous. Resorting to advanced and partly non-standard
methods for computing optimal controls, we solve some instances of the campaign
problem. But even for a very small number of normal agents, just one strategic
agent, and a ten-period campaign length, the problem turns out to be extremely
difficult. Explicitly we discuss moral and political concerns that immediately
arise, if someone starts to analyze the possibilities of an optimal opinion
control.Comment: 47 pages, 12 figures, and 11 table
Optimal Contracts for Outsourced Computation
While expensive cryptographically verifiable computation aims at defeating malicious agents, many civil purposes of outsourced computation tolerate a weaker notion of security, i.e., “lazy-but-honest” contractors. Targeting this type of agents, we develop optimal contracts for outsourcing of computational tasks via appropriate use of rewards, punishments, auditing rate, and “redundancy”. Our contracts provably minimize the expense of the outsourcer (principal) while guaranteeing correct computation. Furthermore, we incorporate practical restrictions of the maximum enforceable fine, limited and/or costly auditing, and bounded budget of the outsourcer. By examining the optimal contracts, we provide insights on how resources should be utilized when auditing capacity and enforceability are limited. Finally, we present a light-weight cryptographic implementation of the contracts and discuss a comparison across different implementations of auditing in outsourced computation
Decentralized Abstractions and Timed Constrained Planning of a General Class of Coupled Multi-Agent Systems
This paper presents a fully automated procedure for controller synthesis for
a general class of multi-agent systems under coupling constraints. Each agent
is modeled with dynamics consisting of two terms: the first one models the
coupling constraints and the other one is an additional bounded control input.
We aim to design these inputs so that each agent meets an individual high-level
specification given as a Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL). Furthermore,
the connectivity of the initially connected agents, is required to be
maintained. First, assuming a polyhedral partition of the workspace, a novel
decentralized abstraction that provides controllers for each agent that
guarantee the transition between different regions is designed. The controllers
are the solution of a Robust Optimal Control Problem (ROCP) for each agent.
Second, by utilizing techniques from formal verification, an algorithm that
computes the individual runs which provably satisfy the high-level tasks is
provided. Finally, simulation results conducted in MATLAB environment verify
the performance of the proposed framework
Distributed convex optimization via continuous-time coordination algorithms with discrete-time communication
This paper proposes a novel class of distributed continuous-time coordination
algorithms to solve network optimization problems whose cost function is a sum
of local cost functions associated to the individual agents. We establish the
exponential convergence of the proposed algorithm under (i) strongly connected
and weight-balanced digraph topologies when the local costs are strongly convex
with globally Lipschitz gradients, and (ii) connected graph topologies when the
local costs are strongly convex with locally Lipschitz gradients. When the
local cost functions are convex and the global cost function is strictly
convex, we establish asymptotic convergence under connected graph topologies.
We also characterize the algorithm's correctness under time-varying interaction
topologies and study its privacy preservation properties. Motivated by
practical considerations, we analyze the algorithm implementation with
discrete-time communication. We provide an upper bound on the stepsize that
guarantees exponential convergence over connected graphs for implementations
with periodic communication. Building on this result, we design a
provably-correct centralized event-triggered communication scheme that is free
of Zeno behavior. Finally, we develop a distributed, asynchronous
event-triggered communication scheme that is also free of Zeno with asymptotic
convergence guarantees. Several simulations illustrate our results.Comment: 12 page
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