Multi-Agent Patrolling with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Patrolling tasks can be encountered in a variety of real-world domains, ranging from computer network administration and surveillance to computer wargame simulations. It is a complex multi-agent task, which usually requires agents to coordinate their decision-making in order to achieve optimal performance of the group as a whole. In this paper, we show how the patrolling task can be modeled as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, allowing continuous and automatic adaptation of the agents? strategies to their environment. We demonstrate that an efficient cooperative behavior can be achieved by using RL methods, such as Q-Learning, to train individual agents. The proposed approach is totally distributed, which makes it computationally efficient. The empirical evaluation proves the effectiveness of our approach, as the results obtained are substantially better than the results available so far on this domain.