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Coverage Games

Authors Orna Kupferman , Noam Shenwald

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LIPIcs.CONCUR.2025.27.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory
  • Computing methodologies → Multi-agent planning
Keywords
  • Two-Player Games
  • ω-Regular Objectives
  • Coverage
  • Planning

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Abstract

We introduce and study coverage games - a novel framework for multi-agent planning in settings in which a system operates several agents but do not have full control on them, or interacts with an environment that consists of several agents.
The game is played between a coverer, who has a set of objectives, and a disruptor. The coverer operates several agents that interact with the adversarial disruptor. The coverer wins if every objective is satisfied by at least one agent. Otherwise, the disruptor wins.
Coverage games thus extend traditional two-player games with multiple objectives by allowing a (possibly dynamic) decomposition of the objectives among the different agents. They have many applications, both in settings where the system is the coverer (e.g., multi-robot surveillance, coverage in multi-threaded systems) and settings where it is the disruptor (e.g., prevention of resource exhaustion, ensuring non-congestion). We study the theoretical properties of coverage games, including determinacy, and the ability to a priori decompose the objectives among the agents. We solve the problems of deciding whether the coverer or the disruptor wins, analyze their tight complexity, and consider useful special cases.

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Orna Kupferman and Noam Shenwald. Coverage Games. In 36th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 348, pp. 27:1-27:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2025.27

Author Details

Orna Kupferman
  • School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Noam Shenwald
  • School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Funding

  • Kupferman, Orna: This research is supported by the European Research Council, Advanced Grant ADVANSYNT.

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