On Risk Evaluation and Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we deal with risk evaluation and risk-averse optimization of complex distributed systems with general risk functionals. We postulate a novel set of axioms for the functionals evaluating the total risk of the system. We derive a dual representation for the systemic risk measures and propose a way to construct non-trivial families of measures by using either a collection of linear scalarizations or non-linear risk aggregation. The new framework facilitates risk-averse sequential decision-making by distributed methods. The proposed approach is compared theoretically and numerically to some of the systemic risk measurements in the existing literature. We formulate a two-stage decision problem with monotropic structure and systemic measure of risk. The structure is typical for distributed systems arising in energy networks, robotics, and other practical situations. A distributed decomposition method for solving the two-stage problem is proposed and it is applied to a problem arising in communication networks. We have used this problem to compare the methods of systemic risk evaluation. We show that the proposed risk aggregation leads to less conservative risk evaluation and results in a substantially better solution of the problem at hand as compared to an aggregation of the risk of individual agents and other methods.