Authors:
Tabajara Krausburg
and
Rafael H. Bordini
Affiliation:
School of Technology, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre and Brazil
Keyword(s):
Coalition Formation, Multi-Agent Systems, JaCaMo, Multi-Agent Programming Contest.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cooperation and Coordination
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Methodologies and Technologies
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Operational Research
;
Simulation
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
This work focuses on coalition formation among heterogeneous agents for a simulated scenario involving logistic and coordination problems. We investigate whether organising a team of agents into a number of coalitions, in which agents collaborate with each other to achieve particular goals, can increase the effectiveness of the team. We apply coalition structure generation specifically to the 2017 multi-agent programming contest, where the agents controlling various autonomous vehicles form a competing team that has to solve logistic problems simulated on the map of a real city. We experiment on three approaches with different configurations. The first uses only a task-allocation mechanism, while the other approaches use either an optimal or a heuristic coalition formation algorithm. Our results show that coalition formation can improve the performance of a participating team under some circumstances. In particular, coalition formation can indeed play an important role when we aim to
balance the skills in groups of agents selected to accomplish some given set of tasks given a larger team of cooperating agents in the presence of dynamically created tasks.
(More)