Overcoming the Limitations of Utility Design for Multiagent Systems

Cooperative control focuses on deriving desirable collective behavior in multiagent systems through the design of local control algorithms. Game theory is beginning to emerge as a valuable set of tools for achieving this objective. A central component of this game theoretic approach is the assignment of utility functions to the individual agents. Here, the goal is to assign utility functions within an “admissible” design space such that the resulting game possesses desirable properties. Our first set of results illustrates the complexity associated with such a task. In particular, we prove that if we restrict the class of utility functions to be local, scalable, and budget-balanced then 1) ensuring that the resulting game possesses a pure Nash equilibrium requires computing a Shapley value, which can be computationally prohibitive for large-scale systems, and 2) ensuring that the allocation which optimizes the system level objective is a pure Nash equilibrium is impossible. The last part of this paper demonstrates that both limitations can be overcome by introducing an underlying state space into the potential game structure.