Mean-Payoff Games with Omega-Regular Specifications

Multi-player mean-payoff games are a natural formalism for modelling the behaviour of concurrent and multi-agent systems with self-interested players. Players in such a game traverse a graph, while trying to maximise a mean-payoff function that depends on the plays so generated. As with all games, the equilibria that could arise may have undesirable properties. However, as system designers, we typically wish to ensure that equilibria in such systems correspond to desirable system behaviours, for example, satisfying certain safety or liveness properties. One natural way to do this would be to specify such desirable properties using temporal logic. Unfortunately, the use of temporal logic specifications causes game theoretic verification problems to have very high computational complexity. To this end, we consider 𝜔-regular specifications, which offer a concise and intuitive way of specifying desirable behaviours of a system. The main results of this work are characterisation and complexity bounds for the problem of determining if there are equilibria that satisfy a given 𝜔-regular specification in a multiplayer mean-payoff game in a number of computationally relevant game-theoretic settings.

Authors

• Thomas Steeples
• Julian Gutierrez
• Michael Wooldridge University of Oxford

Keywords

• Multi-player games
• Mean-payoff games
• Automated verification
• Temporal logic
• Game theory
• Equilibria
• Multi-agent systems