Compositional Synthesis of Reactive Controllers for Multi-agent Systems

Rajeev Alur, Salar Moarref, Ufuk Topcu

Abstract: In this paper we consider the controller synthesis problem for multi-agent systems that consist of a set of controlled and uncontrolled agents. Controlled agents may need to cooperate with each other and react to the actions of uncontrolled agents in order to fulfill their objectives. Besides, the controlled agents may be imperfect, i.e., only partially observe their environment, for example due to the limitations in their sensors. We propose a framework for controller synthesis based on compositional reactive synthesis. We implement the algorithms symbolically and apply them to a robot motion planning case study where multiple robots are placed on a grid-world with static obstacles and other dynamic, uncontrolled and potentially adversarial robots. We consider different objectives such as collision avoidance, keeping a formation and bounded reachability. We show that by taking advantage of the structure of the system, compositional synthesis algorithm can significantly outperform centralized synthesis approach, both from time and memory perspective, and can solve problems where the centralized algorithm is infeasible. Our findings show the potential of symbolic and compositional reactive synthesis methods as planning algorithms in the presence of dynamically changing and possibly adversarial environment.