Verifiable and Scalable Mission-Plan Synthesis for Multiple Autonomous Agents

The problem of synthesizing mission plans for multiple autonomous agents, including path planning and task scheduling, is often complex. Employing model checking alone to solve the problem might not be feasible, especially when the number of agents grows or requirements include real-time constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called MCRL that integrates model checking and reinforcement learning to overcome this limitation. Our approach employs timed automata and timed computation tree logic to describe the autonomous agents' behavior and requirements, and trains the model by a reinforcement learning algorithm, namely Q-learning, to populate a table used to restrict the state space of the model. Our method provides means to synthesize mission plans for multi-agent systems whose complexity exceeds the scalability boundaries of exhaustive model checking, but also to analyze and verify synthesized mission plans to ensure given requirements. We evaluate the proposed method on various scenarios involving autonomous agents, as well as present comparisons with two similar approaches, TAMAA and UPPAAL STRATEGO. The evaluation shows that MCRL performs better for a number of agents greater than three.