Bounding the probability of resource constraint violations in multi-agent MDPs

Bounding the probability of resource constraint violations in multi-agent MDPs

de Nijs, F. (TU Delft Algorithmics)
Walraven, E.M.P. (TU Delft Algorithmics)
de Weerdt, M.M. (TU Delft Algorithmics)
Spaan, M.T.J. (TU Delft Algorithmics)

2017

Multi-agent planning problems with constraints on global resource consumption occur in several domains. Existing algorithms for solving Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes can compute policies that meet a resource constraint in expectation, but these policies provide no guarantees on the probability that a resource constraint violation will occur. We derive a method to bound constraint violation probabilities using Hoeffding's inequality. This method is applied to two existing approaches for computing policies satisfying constraints: the Constrained MDP framework and a Column Generation approach. We also introduce an algorithm to adaptively relax the bound up to a given maximum violation tolerance. Experiments on a hard toy problem show that the resulting policies outperform static optimal resource allocations to an arbitrary level. By testing the algorithms on more realistic planning domains from the literature, we demonstrate that the adaptive bound is able to efficiently trade off violation probability with expected value, outperforming state-of-the-art planners.

Markov Decision Process
Resource constraints
Planning under uncertainty

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5d6c967e-e4b3-4a65-80ec-53d191e3da03

American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

978-1577357803

Proceedings of the 31st Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2017

31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017-02-04 → 2017-02-10, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco, United States

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2017 F. de Nijs, E.M.P. Walraven, M.M. de Weerdt, M.T.J. Spaan