The Power of Communication in a Distributed Multi-Agent System

Single-Agent (SA) Reinforcement Learning systems have shown outstanding results on non-stationary problems. However, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) can surpass SA systems generally and when scaling. Furthermore, MA systems can be super-powered by collaboration, which can happen through observing others, or a communication system used to share information between collaborators. Here, we developed a distributed MA learning mechanism with the ability to communicate based on decentralised partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Minimising the time and energy consumed by training Machine Learning models while improving performance can be achieved by collaborative MA mechanisms. We demonstrate this in a real-world scenario, an offshore wind farm, including a set of distributed wind turbines, where the objective is to maximise collective efficiency. Compared to a SA system, MA collaboration has shown significantly reduced training time and higher cumulative rewards in unseen and scaled scenarios.