Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are increasingly seen as key technologies for buildin g more decentralised and resilient energy grids, but researchers must consider the ethical and social implications of their use E nergy grids are undergoing rapid changes, requiring new ways both to process the large amounts of data generated from the power system, but also - increasingly - to take smart operational decisions [1]. On the data side, the UK and most EU countries have committed to a target of offering a smart meter to every home by 2020 [ 2 ], with similar monitoring being installed in other parts of the energy network. This has led to some to refer to a "data tsunami", requiri ng development of new machine learning techniques to deal with the e nsuing challenge of extracting useful information from this data - often in real time. Another trend is the use of AI techniques (such as those from multi - agent systems, computational gam e theory and decision making under uncertainty) to take autonomous allocation and control decisions. This is driven increasingly by the moves towards more decentralised energy systems, where prosumers (consumers with own micro - generation and storage) can g enerate and source their own electricity through peer - to - peer (P2P) trading in local energy markets and community energy schemes.

This paper studies the problem of spectrum shortage in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network during critical missions such as wildfire monitoring, search and rescue, and disaster monitoring. Such applications involve a high demand for high-throughput data transmissions such as real-time video-, image-, and voice- streaming where the assigned spectrum to the UAV network may not be adequate to provide the desired Quality of Service (QoS). In these scenarios, the aerial network can borrow an additional spectrum from the available terrestrial networks in the trade of a relaying service for them. We propose a spectrum sharing model in which the UAVs are grouped into two classes of relaying UAVs that service the spectrum owner and the sensing UAVs that perform the disaster relief mission using the obtained spectrum. The operation of the UAV network is managed by a hierarchical mechanism in which a central controller assigns the tasks of the UAVs based on their resources and determine their operation region based on the level of priority of impacted areas and then the UAVs autonomously fine-tune their position using a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to maximize the individual throughput and prolong their lifetime. We analyze the performance and the convergence for the proposed method analytically and with extensive simulations in different scenarios.

Reinforcement learning in a multi agent system is difficult because these systems are inherently non-stationary in nature. In such a case, identifying the type of the opposite agent is crucial and can help us address this non-stationary environment. We have investigated if we can employ some probing policies which help us better identify the type of the other agent in the environment. We've made a simplifying assumption that the other agent has a stationary policy that our probing policy is trying to approximate. Our work extends Environmental Probing Interaction Policy framework to handle multi agent environments.

This paper presents an automated peer-to-peer negotiation strategy for settling energy contracts among prosumers in a Residential Energy Cooperative considering heterogeneity prosumer preferences. The heterogeneity arises from prosumers' evaluation of energy contracts through multiple societal and environmental criteria and the prosumers' private preferences over those criteria. The prosumers engage in bilateral negotiations with peers to mutually agree on periodical energy contracts/loans consisting of the energy volume to be exchanged at that period and the return time of the exchanged energy. The negotiating prosumers navigate through a common negotiation domain consisting of potential energy contracts and evaluate those contracts from their valuations on the entailed criteria against a utility function that is robust against generation and demand uncertainty. From the repeated interactions, a prosumer gradually learns about the compatibility of its peers in reaching energy contracts that are closer to Nash solutions. Empirical evaluation on real demand, generation and storage profiles -- in multiple system scales -- illustrates that the proposed negotiation based strategy can increase the system efficiency (measured by utilitarian social welfare) and fairness (measured by Nash social welfare) over a baseline strategy and an individual flexibility control strategy representing the status quo strategy. We thus elicit system benefits from peer-to-peer flexibility exchange already without any central coordination and market operator, providing a simple yet flexible and effective paradigm that complements existing markets.

Envy-freeness is a widely studied notion in resource allocation, capturing some aspects of fairness. The notion of envy being inherently subjective though, it might be the case that an agent envies another agent, but that she objectively has no reason to do so. The difficulty here is to define the notion of objectivity, since no ground-truth can properly serve as a basis of this definition. A natural approach is to consider the judgement of the other agents as a proxy for objectivity. Building on previous work by Parijs (who introduced "unanimous envy") we propose the notion of approval envy: an agent $a_i$ experiences approval envy towards $a_j$ if she is envious of $a_j$, and sufficiently many agents agree that this should be the case, from their own perspectives. Some interesting properties of this notion are put forward. Computing the minimal threshold guaranteeing approval envy clearly inherits well-known intractable results from envy-freeness, but (i) we identify some tractable cases such as house allocation; and (ii) we provide a general method based on a mixed integer programming encoding of the problem, which proves to be efficient in practice. This allows us in particular to show experimentally that existence of such allocations, with a rather small threshold, is very often observed.

We consider a multi-agent model for fair division of mixed manna (i.e. items for which agents can have positive, zero or negative utilities), in which agents have additive utilities for bundles of items. For this model, we give several general impossibility results and special possibility results for three common fairness concepts (i.e. EF1, EFX, EFX3) and one popular efficiency concept (i.e. PO). We also study how these interact with common welfare objectives such as the Nash, disutility Nash and egalitarian welfares. For example, we show that maximizing the Nash welfare with mixed manna (or minimizing the disutility Nash welfare) does not ensure an EF1 allocation whereas with goods and the Nash welfare it does. We also prove that an EFX3 allocation may not exist even with identical utilities. By comparison, with tertiary utilities, EFX and PO allocations, or EFX3 and PO allocations always exist. Also, with identical utilities, EFX and PO allocations always exist. For these cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms, returning such allocations and approximating further the Nash, disutility Nash and egalitarian welfares in special cases.

In large-scale multi-agent systems, the large number of agents and complex game relationship cause great difficulty for policy learning. Therefore, simplifying the learning process is an important research issue. In many multi-agent systems, the interactions between agents often happen locally, which means that agents neither need to coordinate with all other agents nor need to coordinate with others all the time. Traditional methods attempt to use pre-defined rules to capture the interaction relationship between agents. However, the methods cannot be directly used in a large-scale environment due to the difficulty of transforming the complex interactions between agents into rules. In this paper, we model the relationship between agents by a complete graph and propose a novel game abstraction mechanism based on two-stage attention network (G2ANet), which can indicate whether there is an interaction between two agents and the importance of the interaction. We integrate this detection mechanism into graph neural network-based multi-agent reinforcement learning for conducting game abstraction and propose two novel learning algorithms GA-Comm and GA-AC. We conduct experiments in Traffic Junction and Predator-Prey. The results indicate that the proposed methods can simplify the learning process and meanwhile get better asymptotic performance compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Route planning for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a series of translation and rotational steps from a given start location to the destination goal location. The goal of the route planning problem is to determine the most optimal route avoiding any collisions with the obstacles present in the environment. Route planning is an NP-hard optimization problem. In this paper, a newly proposed Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is used, and its performance is compared with deterministic and other Nature-Inspired Algorithms (NIAs). The results illustrate that SSA outperforms all the other meta-heuristic algorithms in route planning for multiple UAVs in a 3D environment. The proposed approach improves the average cost and overall time by 1.25% and 6.035% respectively when compared to recently reported data. Route planning is involved in many real-life applications like robot navigation, self-driving car, autonomous UAV for search and rescue operations in dangerous ground-zero situations, civilian surveillance, military combat and even commercial services like package delivery by drones.

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in reinforcement learning (RL), which has registered great success in solving various sequential decision-making problems in machine learning. Most of the successful RL applications, e.g., the games of Go and Poker, robotics, and autonomous driving, involve the participation of more than one single agent, which naturally fall into the realm of multi-agent RL (MARL), a domain with a relatively long history, and has recently re-emerged due to advances in single-agent RL techniques. Though empirically successful, theoretical foundations for MARL are relatively lacking in the literature. In this chapter, we provide a selective overview of MARL, with focus on algorithms backed by theoretical analysis. More specifically, we review the theoretical results of MARL algorithms mainly within two representative frameworks, Markov/stochastic games and extensive-form games, in accordance with the types of tasks they address, i.e., fully cooperative, fully competitive, and a mix of the two. We also introduce several significant but challenging applications of these algorithms. Orthogonal to the existing reviews on MARL, we highlight several new angles and taxonomies of MARL theory, including learning in extensive-form games, decentralized MARL with networked agents, MARL in the mean-field regime, (non-)convergence of policy-based methods for learning in games, etc. Some of the new angles extrapolate from our own research endeavors and interests. Our overall goal with this chapter is, beyond providing an assessment of the current state of the field on the mark, to identify fruitful future research directions on theoretical studies of MARL. We expect this chapter to serve as continuing stimulus for researchers interested in working on this exciting while challenging topic.

Last March, McDonald's Corp. acquired the startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million, in the hope of employing machine learning to personalize customer experience. In the age of artificial intelligence, this was a no-brainer for McDonald's, since Dynamic Yield is widely recognized for its AI-powered technology and recently even landed a spot in a prestigious list of top AI startups. Neural McNetworks are upon us. Trouble is, Dynamic Yield's platform has nothing to do with AI, according to an article posted on Medium last month by the company's former head of content, Mike Mallazzo. It was a heartfelt takedown of phony AI, which was itself taken down by the author but remains engraved in the collective memory of the internet.