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#1 Approximate Heuristic Search for Semi-Decentralized Systems [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Mahdi Al-Husseini, Kyle H. Wray, Isaac R. Ward, Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Achieving optimal coordination in multiagent systems involves a trade-off between intractable centralized planning and suboptimal decentralized execution. We bridge this gap by introducing Approximate Recursive Small Step-Semi-Decentralized A* (RS-SDA*), a tree search algorithm that exploits time-varying centralization during periods of available communication conditioned on the environment or joint actions. By interleaving offline planning with online search and using relaxed heuristics, RS-SDA* achieves high solution quality with reduced computational overhead. SDec-POMDP benchmark experiments show that Approximate RS-SDA* often finds near exact optimal solutions in less than 1% of the time required by exact algorithms. We show scalability in six labyrinth environments both deterministic and stochastic state transitions, and demonstrate real-world feasibility with a multi-drone search-and-rescue simulation in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge cave system.

Subject: IJCAI.2026 - Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems