Subgoal identification for reinforcement learning and planning in multiagent problem solving

We provide a new probability flow analysis algorithm to automatically identify subgoals in a problem space. Our flow analysis, inspired by preflow-push algorithms, measures the topological structure of the problem space to identify states that connect different subset of state space as the subgoals within linear-time complexity. Then we apply a hybrid approach known as subgoal-based SMDP (semi-Markov Decision Process) that is composed of reinforcement learning and planning based on the identified subgoals to solve the problem in a multiagent environment. The effectiveness of this new method used in a multiagent system is demonstrated and evaluated using a capture-the-flag scenario. We showed also that the cooperative coordination emerged between two agents in the scenario through distributed policy learning.