Novelty Messages Filtering for Multi Agent Privacy-preserving Planning

Abstract: In multi-agent planning, agents jointly compute a plan that achieves mutual goals, keeping certain information private to the individual agents. Agents' coordination is achieved through the transmission of messages. These messages can be a source of privacy leakage as they can permit a malicious agent to collect information about other agents' actions and search states. In this paper, we investigate the usage of novelty techniques in the context of (decentralised) multi-agent privacy-preserving planning, addressing the challenges related to the agents' privacy and performance. In particular, we show that the use of novelty based techniques can significantly reduce the number of messages transmitted among agents, better preserving their privacy and improving their performance. An experimental study analyses the effectiveness of our techniques and compares them with the state-of-the-art. Finally, we evaluate the robustness of our approach, considering different delays in the transmission of messages as they would occur in overloaded networks, due for example to massive attacks or critical situations.