Finding the weakest link(s): Coalition games for decentralized discrete-event control

Abstract

Abstract-In decentralized discrete-event system (DES) architectures, agents fuse their local decisions to arrive at the global decision. The contribution of each agent to the final decision is never assessed; however, it may be the case that only a subset of agents, i.e., a (static) coalition, perpetually contribute towards the correct final decisions. In casting the decentralized DES control (with and without communication) problem as a cooperative game, it is possible to quantify the average contribution that each agent makes towards synthesizing the overall correct control strategy. Specifically, we explore allocations that assess contributions of non-communicating and communicating controllers for this class of problems. This allows a quantification of the contribution that each agent makes to the coalition with respect to decisions made solely based on its partial observations and decisions made based on messages sent to another agent(s) to facilitate a correct control decision.