Communicate only when necessary: Cooperative tasking for multi-agent systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to modify event sharing among agents in multi-agent systems to ensure that complex tasks become decomposable and achievable through cooperative control, even when initially undecomposable.

Contribution

It introduces a procedure to redistribute events among agents to enforce decomposability of undecomposable task automata in multi-agent systems.

Findings

Identifies causes of undecomposability due to over-communication or lack of communication.

Provides a sufficient condition for automaton decomposability.

Demonstrates the approach with illustrative examples.

Abstract

New advances in large scale distributed systems have amazingly offered complex functionalities through parallelism of simple and rudimentary components. The key issue in cooperative control of multi-agent systems is the synthesis of local control and interaction rules among the agents such that the entire controlled system achieves a desired global behavior. For this purpose, three fundamental problems have to be addressed: (1) task decomposition for top-down design, such that the fulfillment of local tasks guarantees the satisfaction of the global task, by the team; (2) fault-tolerant top-down design, such that the global task remains decomposable and achievable, in spite of some failures, and (3) design of interactions among agents to make an undecomposable task decomposable and achievable in a top-down framework. The first two problems have been addressed in our previous works, by identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for task automaton decomposition, and fault-tolerant task decomposability. This paper deals with the third problem and proposes a procedure to redistribute the events among agents in order to enforce decomposability of an undecomposable task automaton. The decomposability conditions are used to identify the root causes of undecomposability which are found to be due to over-communications that have to be deleted, while respecting the fault-tolerant decomposability conditions; or because of the lack of communications that require new sharing of events, while considering new violations of decomposability conditions. This result provides a sufficient condition to make any undecomposable deterministic task automaton decomposable in order to facilitate cooperative tasking. Illustrative examples are presented to show the concept of task automaton decomposabilization.