Partial Local FriendQ Multiagent Learning: Application to Team Automobile Coordination Problem

Abstract

Real world multiagent coordination problems are important issues for reinforcement learning techniques. In general, these problems are partially observable and this characteristic makes the solution computation intractable. Most of the existing approaches calculate exact or approximate solutions using the world model for only one agent. To handle a special case of partial observability, this article presents an approach to approximate the policy measuring a degree of observability for pure cooperative vehicle coordination problem. We compare empirically the performance of the learned policy for totally observable problems and performances of policies for different degrees of observability. If each degree of observability is associated with communication costs, multiagent system designers are able to choose a compromise between the performance of the policy and the cost to obtain the associated degree of observability of the problem. Finally, we show how the available space, surrounding an agent, influence the required degree of observability for near-optimal solution.