Synthesis of Minimum-Cost Shields for Multi-agent Systems

• Published in: Proceedings of the American Control Conference Vol. 2019; pp. 1048 - 1055
• Main Authors: Bharadwaj, Suda, Bloem, Roderik, Dimitrova, Rayna, Konighofer, Bettina, Topcu, Ufuk
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Automatic Control Council 01.01.2019
• ISSN: 0743-1619; 2378-5861
• DOI: 10.23919/ACC.2019.8815233

In this paper, we propose a general approach to derive runtime enforcement implementations for multiagent systems, called shields, from temporal logical specifications. Each agent of the multi-agent system is monitored, and if needed corrected, by the shield, such that a global specification is always satisfied. The different ways of how a shield can interfere with each agent in the system in case of an error introduces the need for quantitative objectives. This work is the first to discuss the shield synthesis problem with quantitative objectives. We provide several cost functions that are utilized in the multi-agent setting and provide methods for the synthesis of cost-optimal shields and fair shields, under the given assumptions on the multi-agent system. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach via a detailed case study on UAV mission planning for warehouse logistics and simulating the shielded multi-agent system on ROS/Gazebo.