Overview and Challenges of Distributed Decision Making in Resource Contested and Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of distributed decision making approaches as they are developed for and deployed in contested and dynamic environments is critical to ensure that recent advancements are used in practice to their maximum potential. In this survey, we focus on the use of decision making algorithms in two pespectives, namely, context and situational awareness (CSA) and decision making based on findings from CSA. We introduce taxonomies of required characteristics and analyse how they are met by existing approaches. Our analysis finds that evaluation of decision making approaches needs to mature to consider critical attributes such as the used network bandwidth, fault tolerance, and robustness among others. The broad majority of experimental analyses focused on showing that the approach works, typically in a small scale scenario, and that attributes such as runtime, network bandwith, and size weight and power, were critically overlooked. None of the approaches consider large action spaces or sparse rewards. We discuss trade-offs and challenges of existing work and highlight research opportunities.