Timely Coordination in a Multi-Agent System

Abstract

In a distributed algorithm, multiple processes, or agents, work toward a common goal. More often than not, the actions of some agents are dependent on the previous execution (if not also on the outcome) of the actions of other agents. The resulting interdependencies between the timings of the actions of the various agents give rise to the study of methods for timely coordination of these actions. In this work, we formulate and mathematically analyze "Timely-Coordinated Response" - a novel multi-agent coordination problem in which the time difference between each pair of actions may be constrained by upper and/or lower bounds. This problem generalizes coordination problems previously studied by Halpern and Moses and by Ben-Zvi and Moses. We optimally solve timely-coordinated response in two ways: using a generalization of the fixed-point approach of Halpern and Moses, and using a generalization of the "syncausality" approach of Ben-Zvi and Moses. We constructively show the equivalence of the solutions yielded by both approaches, and by combining them, derive strengthened versions of known results for some previously-defined special cases of this problem. Our analysis is conducted under minimal assumptions: we work in a continuous-time model with possibly infinitely many agents. The general results we obtain for this model reduce to stronger ones for discrete-time models with only finitely many agents. In order to distill the properties of such models that are significant to this reduction, we define several classes of naturally-occurring models, which in a sense separate the different results. We present both a more practical optimal solution, as well as a surprisingly simple condition for solvability, for timely coordinated response under these models. Finally, we show how our results generalize the results known for previously-studied special cases of this problem.