Multiagent Maximum Coverage Problems: The Trade-off Between Anarchy and Stability

The price of anarchy and price of stability are three well-studied performance metrics that seek to characterize the inefficiency of equilibria in distributed systems. The distinction between these two performance metrics centers on the equilibria that they focus on: the price of anarchy characterizes the quality of the worst-performing equilibria, while the price of stability characterizes the quality of the best-performing equilibria. While much of the literature focuses on these metrics from an analysis perspective, in this work we consider these performance metrics from a design perspective. Specifically, we focus on the setting where a system operator is tasked with designing local utility functions to optimize these performance metrics in a class of games termed covering games. Our main result characterizes a fundamental trade-off between the price of anarchy and price of stability in the form of a fully explicit Pareto frontier. Within this setup, optimizing the price of anarchy comes directly at the expense of the price of stability (and vice versa). Our second results demonstrates how a system-operator could incorporate an additional piece of system-level information into the design of the agents' utility functions to breach these limitations and improve the system's performance. This valuable piece of system-level information pertains to the performance of worst performing agent in the system.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Exponential stabilization of a class of stochastic system with Markovian jump parameters and mode-dependent mixed time-delays

Copyright [2010] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.In this technical note, the globally exponential stabilization problem is investigated for a general class of stochastic systems with both Markovian jumping parameters and mixed time-delays. The mixed mode-dependent time-delays consist of both discrete and distributed delays. We aim to design a memoryless state feedback controller such that the closed-loop system is stochastically exponentially stable in the mean square sense. First, by introducing a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional that accounts for the mode-dependent mixed delays, stochastic analysis is conducted in order to derive a criterion for the exponential stabilizability problem. Then, a variation of such a criterion is developed to facilitate the controller design by using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach. Finally, it is shown that the desired state feedback controller can be characterized explicitly in terms of the solution to a set of LMIs. Numerical simulation is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., the National 973 Program of China under Grant 2009CB320600, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany. Recommended by Associate Editor G. Chesi

Ecosystem-Oriented Distributed Evolutionary Computing

We create a novel optimisation technique inspired by natural ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of genes which are distributed in a peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. We consider from the domain of computer science distributed evolutionary computing, with the relevant theory from the domain of theoretical biology, including the fields of evolutionary and ecological theory, the topological structure of ecosystems, and evolutionary processes within distributed environments. We then define ecosystem- oriented distributed evolutionary computing, imbibed with the properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability from natural ecosystems, including a novel form of distributed evolu- tionary computing. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the apparent compromises resulting from the hybrid model created, such as the network topology.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1112.0204, arXiv:0712.4159, arXiv:0712.4153, arXiv:0712.4102, arXiv:0910.067

Cooperative coevolution of partially heterogeneous multiagent systems

Cooperative coevolution algorithms (CCEAs) facilitate the evolution of heterogeneous, cooperating multiagent systems. Such algorithms are, however, subject to inherent scalability issues, since the number of required evaluations increases with the number of agents. A possible solution is to use partially heterogeneous (hybrid) teams: behaviourally heterogeneous teams composed of homogeneous sub-teams. By having different agents share controllers, the number of coevolving populations in the system is reduced. We propose HybCCEA, an extension of cooperative coevolution to partially heterogeneous multiagent systems. In Hyb-CCEA, both the agent controllers and the team composition are under evolutionary control. During the evolutionary process, we rely on measures of behaviour similarity for the formation of homogeneous sub-teams (merging), and propose a stochastic mechanism to increase heterogeneity (splitting). We evaluate Hyb-CCEA in multiple variants of a simulated herding task, and compare it with a fully heterogeneous CCEA. Our results show that Hyb-CCEA can achieve solutions of similar quality using significantly fewer evaluations, and in most setups, Hyb-CCEA even achieves significantly higher fitness scores than the CCEA. Overall, we show that merging and splitting populations are viable mechanisms for the cooperative coevolution of hybrid teams.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio