The Importance of System-Level Information in Multiagent Systems Design: Cardinality and Covering Problems

A fundamental challenge in multiagent systems is to design local control algorithms to ensure a desirable collective behavior. The information available to the agents, gathered either through communication or sensing, naturally restricts the achievable performance. Hence, it is fundamental to identify what piece of information is valuable and can be exploited to design control laws with enhanced performance guarantees. This paper studies the case when such information is uncertain or inaccessible for a class of submodular resource allocation problems termed covering problems. In the first part of this paper, we pinpoint a fundamental risk-reward tradeoff faced by the system operator when conditioning the control design on a valuable but uncertain piece of information, which we refer to as the cardinality, that represents the maximum number of agents that can simultaneously select any given resource. Building on this analysis, we propose a distributed algorithm that allows agents to learn the cardinality while adjusting their behavior over time. This algorithm is proved to perform on par or better to the optimal design obtained when the exact cardinality is known a priori.