Cooperative Tasking for Deterministic Specification Automata

Abstract: In our previous work [1], a divide-and-conquer approach was proposed for cooperative tasking among multi-agent systems. The basic idea is to decompose a requested global specification into subtasks for individual agents such that the fulfillment of these subtasks by each individual agent leads to the satisfaction of the global specification as a team. It was shown that not all tasks can be decomposed. Furthermore, a necessary and sufficient condition was proposed for the decomposability of a task automaton between two cooperative agents. The current paper continues the results in [1] and proposes necessary and sufficient conditions for task decomposability with respect to arbitrary finite number of agents. It is further shown that the fulfillment of local specifications can guarantee the satisfaction of the global specification. This work provides hints for the designers on how to rule out the indecomposable task automata and enforce the decomposability conditions. The result therefore may pave the way towards a new perspective for decentralized cooperative control of multi-agent systems.