Multi-Agent Decision-Making in the Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab

Presented by

Bassam Alrifaee

Chair of Embedded Software, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Sign up for the event now

Abstract

Networked Model Predictive Control (MPC) systems suffer from low scalability in terms of computation time and communication load when controlled in a centralized manner. Nevertheless, centralized MPC results in stable and feasible solutions, if the MPC problem is well-posed. Distributed MPC can provide better scalability, however, may not provide stable and feasible solutions.

The talk will discuss multiple distribution paradigms for multi-agent control systems. We distinguish two strategies of Distributed MPC (DMPC): cooperative DMPC and non-cooperative DMPC. We will present a novel non-cooperative DMPC strategy that reduces the computation time and the communication load of the entire system in comparison with existing strategies. This strategy uses prioritization of agents in addition to a coupling graph in order to parallelize computations in an otherwise sequential approach. We will discuss the stability and feasibility of this distributed approach and show its applicability to the problem of multi-vehicle decision-making.

To demonstrate the effectiveness in real-time applications, we will show experimental results from our Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab) using model-scale vehicles. The CPM Lab is an open-source development environment for connected and autonomous vehicles with focus on networked decision-making. The CPM Lab hosts 20 physical model-scale vehicles (µCars) which we can seamlessly extend by unlimited simulated vehicles. The CPM Lab allows researchers as well as students from different disciplines to see their ideas developing into reality.

Presenter biography

Bassam is a Junior Principal Investigator at the Chair of Embedded Software, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He is the founder of the Cyber-Physical Mobility Group and Lab. His research interests include Distributed Decision-Making and Verification, Service-Oriented Software Architecture for Control Systems, and their applications to Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. He is the Principal Investigator of a project in the DFG Priority Program 1835: Cooperatively Interacting Automobiles. He is the domain coordinator of the Software Architecture in the large project UNICARagil. From 2011 to 2017, he was a scientific associate with the Institute of Automatic Control at RWTH Aachen University, where he received his PhD.