Acting While Negotiating in the Convoy Formation Problem

Summary

In the convoy formation problem, two embodied agents are negotiating the synchronization of their movement for a portion of the path from their respective sources to destinations. We consider a setting where the negotiation happens in physical time, thus the agents have the opportunity to perform actions while negotiating. Thus, the agent’s behavior is controlled by the interacting pair of negotiation and action strategies. After considering the challenges of acting while negotiating for the general convoy formation problem, we focus on a specific case where convoys can traverse a rectangular obstacle which is unaccessible to individual agents. We propose a general framework for building interacting negotiation and action strategies based on the selfishness and the optimism parameters. We propose two strategies with minimal opponent modeling, and a more complex strategy which uses particle filters to create a time evolving opponent model. Through a series of experiments we study the interaction between the negotiation and action strategies and compare the performance of the proposed strategy pairs in incomplete information scenarios.