Open Decentralized POMDPs
Jonathan Cohen, Jilles Dibangoye, Abdel‐Illah Mouaddib · 2017
Many real-world multi-agent applications such as rescue operations require to dynamically assemble or disassemble teams to provide a service exploiting this flexibility. While Dec-POMDPs capture real-world uncertainty in multi-agent systems, they fail to use the team flexibility. This paper introduces a new model, called the Open Dec-POMDP, allowing us to consider agents that can enter and leave the system during the execution of the process. Exploiting the team flexibility enables us to present a new best-response dynamics' algorithm that uses Monte Carlo simulations to compute joint policies. Our algorithm can dynamically adapt to the team flexibility and computes locally optimal solutions. Experiments demonstrate that Open Dec-POMDP solutions compare favorably on different fire-fighting scenarios to standard Dec-POMDPs'.