MA-HEAD-Net: Adaptive Rule-Guided Multi-Agent DRL for AoI Minimization in UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01128v1
• Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:05:50 GMT
• Title: MA-HEAD-Net: Adaptive Rule-Guided Multi-Agent DRL for AoI Minimization in UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks
• Abstract summary: In post-disaster scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical for establishing emergency communication networks.<n>This paper investigates age of information (AoI) minimization for UAV-assisted emergency communications with heterogeneous emergency services.<n>We develop MA-HEAD-Net, an adaptive rule-guided multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework.
• Score: 71.01350912967922
• License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• Abstract: In post-disaster scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical for establishing emergency communication networks. For time-critical rescue missions, information freshness is crucial because decisions based on outdated data may lead to ineffective control actions. This paper investigates age of information (AoI) minimization for UAV-assisted emergency communications with heterogeneous emergency services. We model bursty packet arrivals using a Markov-modulated Poisson process and adopt finite blocklength theory to capture the coupling among transmission duration, packet completion, and AoI evolution. To balance delay-tolerant long-packet transmission and urgent short-packet response, we propose a mini-slot-embedded scheduling mechanism with adaptive checkpoint-interval selection. We formulate the joint optimization of UAV trajectory control, user scheduling, and checkpoint-interval selection as a multi-agent decision problem, and develop MA-HEAD-Net, an adaptive rule-guided multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework. MA-HEAD-Net incorporates communication-domain rule priors into a gated multi-head policy, where adaptive gates regulate the contributions of rule-prior and learned-policy logits for different subtasks. The policy and gating components are jointly optimized under multi-agent proximal policy optimization. Simulation results show that MA-HEAD-Net improves policy-formation efficiency compared with representative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning baselines and achieves lower AoI than both learning-based and heuristic methods in dynamic UAV-assisted emergency communication scenarios.

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