Cooperative Solutions to Exploration Tasks Under Speed and Budget Constraints

TL;DR

This paper explores multi-agent cooperation in solving dependent tasks under constraints of speed and limited information queries, analyzing how agent speed, number, and budget allocation affect system performance in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-agent system framework that models task dependencies, agent speed, and query budgets, providing insights into optimal resource allocation strategies under constraints.

Findings

Increasing agent speed improves performance up to a point.

More faster agents do not always improve performance due to task dependencies.

Prioritizing faster agents enhances system efficiency, especially with limited budgets.

Abstract

We present a multi-agent system where agents can cooperate to solve a system of dependent tasks, with agents having the capability to explore a solution space, make inferences, as well as query for information under a limited budget. Re-exploration of the solution space takes place by an agent when an older solution expires and is thus able to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. We investigate the effects of task dependencies, with highly-dependent graph $G_{40}$ (a well-known program graph that contains $40$ highly interlinked nodes, each representing a task) and less-dependent graphs $G_{18}$ (a program graph that contains $18$ tasks with fewer links), increasing the speed of the agents and the complexity of the problem space and the query budgets available to agents. Specifically, we evaluate trade-offs between the agent's speed and query budget. During the experiments, we observed that increasing the speed of a single agent improves the system performance to a certain point only, and increasing the number of faster agents may not improve the system performance due to task dependencies. Favoring faster agents during budget allocation enhances the system performance, in line with the "Matthew effect." We also observe that allocating more budget to a faster agent gives better performance for a less-dependent system, but increasing the number of faster agents gives a better performance for a highly-dependent system.