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JAIT 2025 Vol.16(8): 1178-1186
doi: 10.12720/jait.16.8.1178-1186

Enabling Real-Time Communication in Multi-Agent Systems: A Graph Neural Network Based Approach

Paula Stocco, Alan Hesu, and Steven J. Spencer *
Unmanned Systems and Autonomy, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, USA
Email: stoccop@sandia.gov (P.S.); ahhesu@sandia.gov (A.H.); sjspenc@sandia.gov (S.J.S.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received February 15, 2025; revised February 25, 2025; accepted May 9, 2025; published August 26, 2025.

Abstract—Global connectivity enables effective coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Solving these connection problems under hardware constraints is an NP-hard non-Euclidean Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree (DCMST) problem. Prior MAS controllers coordinate team movement for task completion and collision avoidance; some considering Line-of-Sight (LOS) maintenance but prioritizing flexibility over guarantees. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been shown to find good solutions for DCMST, but their performance degrades with larger populations required to support a large MAS. We present a method based on edge graph attention networks, trained offline to reduce online computation times. Empirical comparisons with greedy polynomial-time solvers and EA show that our method leverages latent graph information to consistently find constraint-satisfying solutions in less time.
 
Keywords—multi-agent system, connectivity maintenance, minimum spanning tree, graph neural network, evolutionary algorithm

Cite: Paula Stocco, Alan Hesu, and Steven J. Spencer, "Enabling Real-Time Communication in Multi-Agent Systems: A Graph Neural Network Based Approach," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 16, No. 8, pp. 1178-1186, 2025. doi: 10.12720/jait.16.8.1178-1186

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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