Communication decisions in multi-agent cooperation: model and experiments

In multi-agent cooperation, agents share a common goal, which is evaluated through a global utility function. However, an agent typically cannot observe the global state of an uncertain environment, and therefore they must communicate with each other in order to share the information needed for deciding which actions to take. We argue that, when communication incurs a cost (due to resource consumption, for example), whether to communicate or not also becomes a decision to make. Hence, communication decision becomes part of the overall agent decision problem. In order to explicitly address this problem, we present a multi-agent extension to Markov decision processes in which communication can be modeled as an explicit action that incurs a cost. This framework provides a foundation for a quantified study of agent coordination policies and provides both motivation and insight to the design of heuristic approaches. An example problem is studied under this framework. From this example we can see the impact communication policies have on the overall agent policies, and what implications we can find toward the design of agent coordination policies.