A Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Decision-Making for Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems Under the Presence of Adversarial Agents

Abstract

Underlying relationships among Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in hazardous scenarios can be represented as Game-theoretic models. This paper proposes a new hierarchical network-based model called Game-theoretic Utility Tree (GUT), which decomposes high-level strategies into executable low-level actions for cooperative MAS decisions. It combines with a new payoff measure based on agent needs for real-time strategy games. We present an Explore game domain, where we measure the performance of MAS achieving tasks from the perspective of balancing the success probability and system costs. We evaluate the GUT approach against state-of-the-art methods that greedily rely on rewards of the composite actions. Conclusive results on extensive numerical simulations indicate that GUT can organize more complex relationships among MAS cooperation, helping the group achieve challenging tasks with lower costs and higher winning rates. Furthermore, we demonstrated the applicability of the GUT using the simulator-hardware testbed - Robotarium. The performances verified the effectiveness of the GUT in the real robot application and validated that the GUT could effectively organize MAS cooperation strategies, helping the group with fewer advantages achieve higher performance.