Abstract
There is a very rich variety of systems of autonomous agents, be it software or robotic agents. In particular, multi-agent systems can include agents that may be part of a team and need to coordinate their actions during their distributed task execution. This coordination requires an agent to observe, i.e., to monitor, the other agents in order to detect a possible coordination failure of the team. Several researchers have addressed the problem of monitoring for single or multiple agent systems and have contributed successful, but mainly application-specific, approaches. In this paper, we aim at contributing a unifying, domain-independent statement of the distributed multi-agent monitoring problem. We define the problem in terms of a pre-defined desirable joint state and an observation-state mapping. Given a concrete joint observation during execution, we show how an agent can detect a possible coordination failure by processing the observation-state mapping and the desirable joint state. To illustrate the generality of our formalism, one of the main contributions of the paper, we represent several previously studied examples within our formalism. We note that basic failure detection algorithms can be computationally expensive. We further contribute an efficient method for failure detection that builds upon an off-line compilation of the principled relations introduced. We show empirical results that demonstrate this effectiveness.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Milind Tambe, W. Lewis Johnson, Randy Jones, Frank Koss, John E. Laird, Paul S. Rosenbloom, and Karl Schwamb. Intelligent agents for interactive simulation environments. AI Magazine, 16(1), Spring 1995.
Marcus James Huber and Tedd Hadley. Multiple roles, multiple teams, dynamic environment: Autonomous netrek agents. In W. Lewis Johnson, editor, Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 332–339, Marina del Rey, CA, 1997. ACM Press.
Hiroaki Kitano, Milind Tambe, Peter Stone, Manuela Veloso, Silvia Coradeschi, E. Os-awa, H. Matsubara, Itsuki Noda, and M. Asada. The RoboCup synthetic agent challenge ’97. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Nagoya, Japan, 1997.
Lynne E. Parker. ALLIANCE: An architecture for fault tolerant multirobot cooperation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 14(2):220–240, April 1998.
Tucker Balch. Behavioral Diversity in Learning Robot Teams. PhD thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998.
Maja J. Mataric. Interaction and Intelligent Behavior. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Sebastien Rougeaux, Makoto Ishii, Nobuyuki Kita, Shigeyuki Sakane, and Masayoshi Kakikura. Cooperation by observation—the framework and the basic task patterns. In the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 767–773, San-Diego, CA, May 1994. IEEE Computer Society Press.
Gal A. Kaminka and Milind Tambe. Robust multi-agent teams via socially-attentive monitoring. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 12:105–147, 2000.
Richard Washington. Markov tracking for agent coordination. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 70–77, Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, 1998. ACM Press.
Milind Tambe. Tracking dynamic team activity. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), August 1996.
Milind Tambe. Towards flexible teamwork. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 7:83–124, 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Tokyo
About this paper
Cite this paper
Browning, B., Kaminka, G.A., Veloso, M.M. (2002). Principled Monitoring of Distributed Agents for Detection of Coordination Failure. In: Asama, H., Arai, T., Fukuda, T., Hasegawa, T. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 5. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-65943-3
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-65941-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive