Fairness in Multi-Agent Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel fairness-aware methods for multi-agent planning that ensure equitable goal distribution without significantly increasing plan costs, demonstrated through empirical benchmarks.

Contribution

It adapts existing fairness schemes to MAP and proposes two new cost-aware approaches for fair goal assignment and planning.

Findings

Fairness-aware approaches outperform baselines in benchmarks.

Minimal cost increase for achieving fairness.

Effective goal distribution among agents.

Abstract

In cooperative Multi-Agent Planning (MAP), a set of goals has to be achieved by a set of agents. Independently of whether they perform a pre-assignment of goals to agents or they directly search for a solution without any goal assignment, most previous works did not focus on a fair distribution/achievement of goals by agents. This paper adapts well-known fairness schemes to MAP, and introduces two novel approaches to generate cost-aware fair plans. The first one solves an optimization problem to pre-assign goals to agents, and then solves a centralized MAP task using that assignment. The second one consists of a planning-based compilation that allows solving the joint problem of goal assignment and planning while taking into account the given fairness scheme. Empirical results in several standard MAP benchmarks show that these approaches outperform different baselines. They also show that there is no need to sacrifice much plan cost to generate fair plans.