CAREER: Decentralized Constraint-Based Optimization for Multi-Agent Planning and Coordination

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There is a growing need for optimization methods to support decentralized decision-making in complex multi-agent systems including target tracking in sensor networks, mission planning of unmanned autonomous vehicles, coordination of rescue robots in disaster scenarios, and scheduling of intelligent devices in smart homes within smart grids. This class of problems is particularly challenging to solve due to a combination of the following requirements: There is a high degree of uncertainty that must be taken into account during planning; the planning process must be done in a decentralized fashion; and the resulting plan must be executed in a decentralized way as well. The objective of this project is to respond to the crucial challenge of developing an integrated approach that captures all these requirements within a single framework in order to improve the scope and applicability of multi-agent techniques in real-world applications. The long-term broader impacts of this project include the potential for the research findings to improve decentralized decision-making in real-world problems. In the short term, high-school students will benefit from the education modules developed by the PI, which will be disseminated through collaborations with local outreach programs as well as local teachers and summer camp organizers. The students will develop better computational thinking skills and be exposed to computational concepts applied to relevant applications of interest. The significance of these efforts is made more crucial by the fact that a majority of the student body at local high-schools as well as at NMSU is Hispanic. This project will make the necessary foundational contributions to the field of multi-agent systems to improve the scope and applicability of such systems, especially those that utilize automated planning and constraint optimization techniques, in the real world. More specifically, this project will result in (i) novel ways to more accurately model a large class of multi-agent planning problems using decentralized constraint-based models; (ii) new scalable algorithms with theoretical guarantees suitable for solving large-scale decentralized planning problems; and (iii) effective ways of improving computational thinking in high-school students via the use of constraint-based representations.