Search

We consider a setting where a team of humans oversee the coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform a number of search tasks in dynamic environments that may cause the UAVs to drop out. Hence, we develop a set of multi-UAV supervisory control interfaces and a multi-agent coordination algorithm to support human decision making in this setting. To elucidate the resulting interactional issues, we compare manual and mixed-initiative task allocation in both static and dynamic environments in lab studies with 40 participants and observe that our mixed initiative system results in lower workloads and better performance in re-planning tasks than one which only involves manual task allocation. Our analysis points to new insights into the way humans appropriate flexible autonomy.

We present a novel negotiation protocol to facilitate energy exchange between off-grid homes that are equipped with renewable energy generation and electricity storage. Our protocol imposes restrictions over negotiation such that it reduces the complex interdependent multi-issue negotiation to one where agents have a strategy profile in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. We show that our protocol is concurrent, scalable and; under certain conditions; leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes.

We consider a setting where an agent-based plannerinstructs teams of human emergency responders toperform tasks in the real world. Due to uncertaintyin the environment and the inability of the plannerto consider all human preferences and all attributesof the real-world, humans may reject planscomputed by the agent. A na¨?ve solution that replansgiven a rejection is inefficient and does notguarantee the new plan will be acceptable. Hence,we propose a new model re-planning problem usinga Multi-agent Markov Decision Process thatintegrates potential rejections as part of the planningprocess and propose a novel algorithm to efficientlysolve this new model. We empirically evaluateour algorithm and show that it outperformscurrent benchmarks. Our algorithm is also shownto perform better in pilot studies with real humans.

We consider the coalition structure generation (CSG) problem on synergy graphs, which arises in many practical applications where communication constraints, social or trust relationships must be taken into account when forming coalitions. We propose a novel representation of this problem based on the concept of edge contraction, and an innovative branch and bound approach (CFSS), which is particularly efficient when applied to a general class of characteristic functions. This new model provides a non-redundant partition of the search space, hence allowing an effective parallelisation. We evaluate CFSS on two benchmark functions, the edge sum with coordination cost and the collective energy purchasing functions, comparing its performance with the best algorithm for CSG on synergy graphs: DyCE. The latter approach is centralised and cannot be efficiently parallelised due to the exponential memory requirements in the number of agents, which limits its scalability (while CFSS memory requirements are only polynomial). Our results show that, when the graphs are very sparse, CFSS is 4 orders of magnitude faster than DyCE. Moreover, CFSS is the first approach to provide anytime approximate solutions with quality guarantees for very large systems (i.e., with more than 2700 agents)., Cerquides and Rodríguez-Aguilar are funded by projects COR (TIN2012-38876-C02-01), AT (CSD2007-0022), and the Generalitat of Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434. This work was supported by the EPSRC-Funded ORCHID Project EP/I011587/1

Distribution network operators face a number of challenges; capacity constrained networks, and balancing electricity demand with generation from intermittent renewable resources. Thus, there is an increasing need for scalable approaches to facilitate optimal dispatch in the distribution network. To this end, we cast the optimal dispatch problem as a decentralised agent-based coordination problem and formalise it as a DCOP. We show how this can be decomposed as a factor graph and solved in a decentralised manner using algorithms based on the generalised distributive law; in particular, the max-sum algorithm. We go on to show that max-sum applied na?vely in this setting performs a large number of redundant computations. To address this issue, we present a novel decentralised message passing algorithm using dynamic programming that outperforms max-sum by pruning the search space. We empirically evaluate our algorithm using real distribution network data, showing that it outperforms (in terms of computational time and total size of messages sent) both a centralised approach, which uses IBM’s ILOG CPLEX 12.2, and max-sum, for large networks.

The use of energy storage devices in homes has been advocated as one of the main ways of saving energy and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels in the future Smart Grid. However, if micro-storage devices are all charged at the same time using power from the electricity grid, it means a higher demand and, hence, requires more generation capacity, results in more carbon emissions, and, in the worst case, breaks down the system due to over-demand. To alleviate such issues, in this paper, we present a novel agent-based micro-storage management technique that allows all (individually-owned) storage devices in the system to converge to profitable, efficient behaviour. Specifically, we provide a general framework within which to analyse the Nash equilibrium of an electricity grid and devise new agent-based storage learning strategics that adapt to market conditions. Taken altogether, our solution shows that, specifically, in the UK electricity market, it is possible to achieve savings of up to 13% on average for a consumer on his electricity bill with a storage device of 4 kWh. Moreover, we show that there exists an equilibrium where only 38% of UK households would own storage devices and where social welfare would be also maximised (with an overall annual savings of nearly GBP 1.5B at that equilibrium). Copyright © 2010, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.

Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms are often used to allocate tasks to selfish and rational agents. VCG mechanisms are incentive-compatible, direct mechanisms that are efficient (i.e. maximise social utility) and individually rational (i.e. agents prefer to join rather than opt out). However, an important assumption of these mechanisms is that the agents will always successfully complete their allocated tasks. Clearly, this assumption is unrealistic in many real-world applications where agents can, and often do, fail in their endeavours. Moreover, whether an agent is deemed to have failed may be perceived differently by different agents. Such subjective perceptions about an agent’s probability of succeeding at a given task are often captured and reasoned about using the notion of trust. Given this background, in this paper, we investigate the design of novel mechanisms that take into account the trust between agents when allocating tasks. Specifically, we develop a new class of mechanisms, called trust-based mechanisms, that can take into account multiple subjective measures of the probability of an agent succeeding at a given task and produce allocations that maximise social utility, whilst ensuring that no agent obtains a negative utility. We then show that such mechanisms pose a challenging new combinatorial optimisation problem (that is NP-complete), devise a novel representation for solving the problem, and develop an effective integer programming solution (that can solve instances with about 2×105 possible allocations in 40 seconds).