Exploiting coordination locales in distributed POMDPs via social model shaping

Distributed POMDPs provide an expressive framework for modeling multiagent collaboration problems, but NEXP-Complete complexity hinders their scalability and application in real-world domains. This paper introduces a subclass of distributed POMDPs, and TREMOR, an algorithm to solve such distributed POMDPs. The primary novelty of TREMOR is that agents plan individually with a single agent POMDP solver and use social model shaping to implicitly coordinate with other agents. Experiments demonstrate that TREMOR can provide solutions orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms while achieving comparable, or even superior, solution quality. Copyright © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.