Making decisions in complex environments is a key challenge in artificial intelligence (AI). Situations involving multiple decision makers are particularly complex, leading to computational intractability of principled solution methods. A body of work in AI has tried to mitigate this problem by trying to distill interaction to its essence: how does the policy of one agent influence another agent? If we can find more compact representations of such influence, this can help us deal with the complexity, for instance by searching the space of influences rather than the space of policies. However, so far these notions of influence have been restricted in their applicability to special cases of interaction. In this paper we formalize influence-based abstraction (IBA), which facilitates the elimination of latent state factors without any loss in value, for a very general class of problems described as factored partially observable stochastic games (fPOSGs). On the one hand, this generalizes existing descriptions of influence, and thus can serve as the foundation for improvements in scalability and other insights in decision making in complex multiagent settings. On the other hand, since the presence of other agents can be seen as a generalization of single agent settings, our formulation of IBA also provides a sufficient statistic for decision making under abstraction for a single agent. We also give a detailed discussion of the relations to such previous works, identifying new insights and interpretations of these approaches. In these ways, this paper deepens our understanding of abstraction in a wide range of sequential decision making settings, providing the basis for new approaches and algorithms for a large class of problems.

Over the last decade, methods for multiagent planning under uncertainty have increased in scalability. However, many methods assume value factorization or are not able to provide quality guarantees. We propose a novel family of influence-optimistic upper bounds on the optimal value for problems with lOOs of agents that do not exhibit value fec-torization.

This demo paper serves to describe a research platform for autonomous surveillance by mobile robots. System components from various technical disciplines (including robot navigation, computer vision, discrete event systems, and human-computer interaction) have been combined together into a cohesive, modular system architecture. We employ our architecture to experiment with state-of-the-art methods in planning and decision making under uncertainty, which we demonstrate enable robots to effectively patrol and respond to surveillance events in a large indoor environment.

Integrating large-scale micro-generation in distribution grids is challenging for distribution grid operators, particularly when renewable energy sources (RES) and micro-cogeneration are involved. In this paper we contend that recent developments in multiagent decision making under uncertainty can positively contribute to safe, efficient and cost-effective operation of future distribution grids.