Distributed constraint optimization for cooperative autonomous vehicles

After the Second World War, chemical warfare agents and munitions were dumped in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.<br/>In order to assess the severity of the environmental consequences, it is important that the chemical warfare agents are located and their condition is investigated as soon as possible.<br/>In order to reduce this time, the...

Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems

In this thesis I research the ability of groups of agents to organize their collective behavior, without any human intervention. Using a framework for gathering information of the behavior, analyzing the performance, and updating the behavior, the agents can adapt to changing environments or user requirements. In my thesis I use different...

Decentralized Reinforcement Learning of robot behaviors

A multi-agent methodology is proposed for Decentralized Reinforcement Learning (DRL) of individual behaviors in problems where multi-dimensional action spaces are involved. When using this methodology, sub-tasks are learned in parallel by individual agents working toward a common goal. In addition to proposing this methodology, three specific...

Coordination by design and the price of autonomy

We consider a multi-agent planning problem as a set of activities that has to be planned by several autonomous agents. In general, due to the possible dependencies between the agents’ activities or interactions during execution of those activities, allowing agents to plan individually may lead to a very inefficient or even infeasible solution to...