Robust Networked Multiagent Optimization: Designing Agents to Repair Their Own Utility Functions

Philip N. Brown (), Joshua H. Seaton () and Jason R. Marden ()
Additional contact information
Philip N. Brown: University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Joshua H. Seaton: University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Jason R. Marden: University of California Santa Barbara

Dynamic Games and Applications, 2023, vol. 13, issue 1, No 8, 187-207

Abstract: Abstract We study settings in which autonomous agents are designed to optimize a given system-level objective. In typical approaches to this problem, each agent is endowed with a decision-making rule that specifies the agent’s choice as a function of relevant information pertaining to the system’s state. The choices of other agents in the system comprise a key component of this information. This paper considers a scenario in which the designed decision-making rules are not implementable in the realized system due to discrepancies between the anticipated and realized information available to the agents. The focus of this paper is to develop methods by which the agents can preserve system-level performance guarantees in these unanticipated scenarios through local and independent redesigns of their own decision-making rules. First, we show a general impossibility result which states that in general settings, there are no local redesign methodologies that can offer any preservation of system-level performance guarantees, even when the affected agents satisfy an inconsequentiality criterion. However, we then show that when system-level objectives are submodular, local redesigns of utility functions do exist which allow nominal performance guarantees to degrade gracefully as information is denied to agents. That is, in these submodular settings, agents can adapt to informational inconsistencies independently without incurring much loss in terms of system-level performance.

Keywords: Game theory; Networked learning; Distributed optimization; Utility design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13235-022-00469-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:dyngam:v:13:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s13235-022-00469-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13235

DOI: 10.1007/s13235-022-00469-5

Access Statistics for this article

Dynamic Games and Applications is currently edited by Georges Zaccour

More articles in Dynamic Games and Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().