Cyber Physical Games: Rational Multi-Agent Decision-Making in Temporally Non-Deterministic Environments

We describe a formulation of multi-agents operating within a Cyber Physical System, resulting in collaborative or adversarial games. We show that the non-determinism inherent in the communication medium between agents and the underlying physical environment give rise to environment evolution that is a probabilistic function of agents’ strategies. We name these emergent properties Cyber Physical Games and study its properties. We present an algorithmic model that determines the most likely system evolution, approximating Cyber Physical Games through Probabilistic Finite State Automata, which can be used to drive agent strategies toward best performance. We evaluate it on collaborative and adversarial versions of the Iterated Boolean Game, comparing theoretical results with simulated ones, showing that the algorithm can be successfully used to guide agent strategy, outperforming other methods. Results support the validity of the proposed model and suggest several required research directions to continue evolving our understanding of Cyber Physical System, as well as how to best design agents that must operate within such environments.