Fairness in Multi-Agent Planning
This work addresses fairness in multi-agent planning for domains like robotics or logistics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing fairness schemes.
The paper tackles the problem of fairness in cooperative multi-agent planning by adapting fairness schemes and introducing two novel cost-aware approaches to generate fair plans, showing that these approaches outperform baselines without significantly sacrificing plan cost.
In cooperative Multi-Agent Planning (MAP), a set of goals has to be achieved by a set of agents. Independently of whether they perform a pre-assignment of goals to agents or they directly search for a solution without any goal assignment, most previous works did not focus on a fair distribution/achievement of goals by agents. This paper adapts well-known fairness schemes to MAP, and introduces two novel approaches to generate cost-aware fair plans. The first one solves an optimization problem to pre-assign goals to agents, and then solves a centralized MAP task using that assignment. The second one consists of a planning-based compilation that allows solving the joint problem of goal assignment and planning while taking into account the given fairness scheme. Empirical results in several standard MAP benchmarks show that these approaches outperform different baselines. They also show that there is no need to sacrifice much plan cost to generate fair plans.