Seminar Details
2020-04-28 (14:00) : Challenges in Open Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Arrivals and Departures
At MS Teams
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Hendrickx, Julien
Abstract :
Scalability and robustness to agent losses are often cited as advantages of multi-agent systems, but almost all theoretical results apply to system with fixed compositions. We consider open systems, that agents continuously leave and join during the process considered. We discuss the general challenges to analyze and design algorithms for such systems.
Challenges in the analysis come from the fact that each arrival or departure implies a discontinuity and a change of the system state dimension. Moreover, these repeated events forbid any asymptotic convergence.
On the design side, arrivals perturb the system and may also modify the algorithms objective. Departures result in information loss, or conversely, in a persistent influence of information that is no longer relevant. Moreover, correction mechanisms designed to cope with a small number of arrivals or departures may fail or even have a counterproductive and destabilizing effect, when these events keep taking place.
We focus in particular on averaging, decentralized estimation, computation of the maximum value and decentralized optimization. We also present some fundamental performance limitations in open systems.