Mechanism Design for Communication in Cooperative Systems

Claudia V. Goldman and Shlomo Zilberstein. Mechanism Design for Communication in Cooperative Systems. Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Game Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents (GTDT), Melbourne, Australia, 2003.

Abstract

Distributed systems are characterized by having partial ob- servability of the global state during execution. Neverthe- less, when these systems comprise cooperative agents, they should attain global objectives. Planning for these decen- tralized systems is a very complex task. Exchange of local information through communication can alleviate this com- plexity by allowing the agents to be synchronized from time to time. Due to costs associated with real-world communi- cation, agents may not be able to continuously obtain full observability of the system. We examine mechanisms that result in the decomposition of the global problem into lo- cal simpler problems that are applied each time the agents exchange information. The communication policies are com- puted with respect to a given mechanism and policy of ac- tion. This paper presents a framework to study these mech- anisms and evaluation criteria to compare them. We also review related work on mechanism design and compare the approaches.

Bibtex entry:

@inproceedings{GZgtdt03,
  author	= {Claudia V. Goldman and Shlomo Zilberstein},
  title		= {Mechanism Design for Communication in Cooperative Systems},
  booktitle     = {Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Game Theoretic and Decision
                   Theoretic Agents},
  year		= {2003},
  pages		= {},
  address       = {Melbourne, Australia},
  url		= {http://anytime.cs.umass.edu/shlomo/papers/GZgtdt03.html}
}

shlomo@cs.umass.edu