Distributed optimization in multi-agent systems: applications to distributed regression
Sundhar Ram Srinivasan · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2010
The context for this work is cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS). An agent is an intelligent entity that can measure some aspect of its environment, process information and possibly influence the environment through its action. A cooperative MAS can be defined as a loosely coupled network of agents that interact and cooperate to solve problems that are beyond the individual capabilities or knowledge of each agent. The focus of this thesis is distributed stochastic optimization in multi-agent systems. In distributed optimization, the complete optimization problem is not available at a single location but is distributed among different agents. The distributed optimization problem is additionally stochastic when the information available to each agent is with stochastic errors. Communication constraints, lack of global information about the network topology and the absence of coordinating agents make it infeasible to collect all the information at a single location and then treat it as a centralized optimization problem. Thus, the problem has to be solved using algorithms that are distributed, i.e., different