Hamilton's Rule for Enabling Altruism in Multi-Agent Systems
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908364318965760 |
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| author | Butler, Brooks A. Egerstedt, Magnus |
| author_facet | Butler, Brooks A. Egerstedt, Magnus |
| contents | This paper explores the application of Hamilton's rule to altruistic decision-making in multi-agent systems. Inspired by biological altruism, we introduce a framework that evaluates when individual agents should incur costs to benefit their neighbors. By adapting Hamilton's rule, we define agent ``fitness" in terms of task productivity rather than genetic survival. We formalize altruistic decision-making through a graph-based model of multi-agent interactions and propose a solution using collaborative control Lyapunov functions. The approach ensures that altruistic behaviors contribute to the collective goal-reaching efficiency of the system. We illustrate this framework on a multi-agent way-point navigation problem, where we show through simulation how agent importance levels influence altruistic decision-making, leading to improved coordination in navigation tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_09841 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Hamilton's Rule for Enabling Altruism in Multi-Agent Systems Butler, Brooks A. Egerstedt, Magnus Multiagent Systems Systems and Control This paper explores the application of Hamilton's rule to altruistic decision-making in multi-agent systems. Inspired by biological altruism, we introduce a framework that evaluates when individual agents should incur costs to benefit their neighbors. By adapting Hamilton's rule, we define agent ``fitness" in terms of task productivity rather than genetic survival. We formalize altruistic decision-making through a graph-based model of multi-agent interactions and propose a solution using collaborative control Lyapunov functions. The approach ensures that altruistic behaviors contribute to the collective goal-reaching efficiency of the system. We illustrate this framework on a multi-agent way-point navigation problem, where we show through simulation how agent importance levels influence altruistic decision-making, leading to improved coordination in navigation tasks. |
| title | Hamilton's Rule for Enabling Altruism in Multi-Agent Systems |
| topic | Multiagent Systems Systems and Control |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09841 |