Formal Modeling of Communication Decisions in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems

When collaborative agents cannot observe the global state of an uncertain environment, they must communicate in order to achieve their common goals, which is evaluated through a global utility function. We develop a multiagent extension to Markov decision processes in which communication is an explicit action that incurs a cost. Thus, agents have to decide not only which local action to perform, but also whether it is worthwhile to perform a communication action. This framework provides a foundation for a formal study of agent coordination policies and provides both motivation and insight to the design of heuristic approaches. An example problem is studied under this framework and its implications to coordination are discussed. Theme areas: decision theory for cooperative multi-agent systems, heuristic evaluations