Integrated cooperation and competition in multi-agent decision-making

• Main Authors: WRAY, Kyle Hollins, KUMAR, Akshat, ZILBERSTEIN, Shlomo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Databases and Information Systems; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4049; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5052/viewcontent/WKZaaai18.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Observing that many real-world sequential decision problems are not purely cooperative or purely competitive, we propose a new model—cooperative-competitive process (CCP)—that can simultaneously encapsulate both cooperation and competition.First, we discuss how the CCP model bridges the gap between cooperative and competitive models. Next, we investigate a specific class of group-dominant CCPs, in which agents cooperate to achieve a common goal as their primary objective, while also pursuing individual goals as a secondary objective. We provide an approximate solution for this class of problems that leverages stochastic finite-state controllers.The model is grounded in two multi-robot meeting and box pushing domains that are implemented in simulation and demonstrated on two real robots.