Distributed Stackelberg Strategies in State-based Potential Games for Autonomous Decentralized Learning Manufacturing Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces DS2-SbPG, a novel distributed game framework combining potential and Stackelberg games for decentralized manufacturing systems, enabling multi-objective optimization with proven convergence and real-world efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a new distributed game structure that improves multi-objective optimization in decentralized systems, with convergence guarantees and practical validation.

Findings

Significant power consumption reduction in experiments

Enhanced overall system performance

Effective in real-world industrial scenarios

Abstract

This article describes a novel game structure for autonomously optimizing decentralized manufacturing systems with multi-objective optimization challenges, namely Distributed Stackelberg Strategies in State-Based Potential Games (DS2-SbPG). DS2-SbPG integrates potential games and Stackelberg games, which improves the cooperative trade-off capabilities of potential games and the multi-objective optimization handling by Stackelberg games. Notably, all training procedures remain conducted in a fully distributed manner. DS2-SbPG offers a promising solution to finding optimal trade-offs between objectives by eliminating the complexities of setting up combined objective optimization functions for individual players in self-learning domains, particularly in real-world industrial settings with diverse and numerous objectives between the sub-systems. We further prove that DS2-SbPG constitutes a dynamic potential game that results in corresponding converge guarantees. Experimental validation conducted on a laboratory-scale testbed highlights the efficacy of DS2-SbPG and its two variants, such as DS2-SbPG for single-leader-follower and Stack DS2-SbPG for multi-leader-follower. The results show significant reductions in power consumption and improvements in overall performance, which signals the potential of DS2-SbPG in real-world applications.