A better-response strategy for self-interested planning agents

Abstract

When self-interested agents plan individually, interactions that prevent them from executing their actions as planned may arise. In these coordination problems, game-theoretic planning can be used to enhance the agents’ strategic behavior considering the interactions as part of the agents’ utility. In this work, we define a general-sum game in which interactions such as conflicts and congestions are reflected in the agents’ utility. We propose a better-response planning strategy that guarantees convergence to an equilibrium joint plan by imposing a tax to agents involved in conflicts. We apply our approach to a real-world problem in which agents are Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs). The EAVs intend to find a joint plan that ensures their individual goals are achievable in a transportation scenario where congestion and conflicting situations may arise. Although the task is computationally hard, as we theoretically prove, the experimental results show that our approach outperforms similar approaches in both performance and solution quality.