Acquaintance Model Based Coalition Planning in Humanitarian Relief Operations

Abstract : This report results from a contract tasking Czech Technical University of Prague as follows: The contractor will investigate application of their collaboration acquaintance based multi-agent system (MAS) to Coalition Planning in Operations Other Than War (OOTW). Application of MAS in coalition formation has already been studied. This effort will analyze the use of the Tri-Base Acquaintance 3bA) model as the formal model of agents' mutual awareness in this domain. A research prototype (based on their experience implementing 3bA model in a MAS for project-driven production planning) will demonstrate and support the validity of their claims about the 3bA formal model of agents' mutual awareness. This effort will (1) investigate potential roles of agent-based computing in OOTW, (2) investigate required functionality of possible multi-agent systems and (3) demonstrate the capacity of acquaintance models in practical, efficient and close-to-autonomous coalition formation and planning. The task of planning humanitarian relief operations within a high number of hardly collaborating and vague linked nongovernmental organizations is a challenging problem. We suggest an alternative knowledge based approach to the coalition formation problem for humanitarian and peace-keeping missions. Owing to the very special nature of this domain, where the agents representing individual organizations may eventually agree to collaborate, but are very often reluctant to share their knowledge and resources, we tried to reduce the problem complexity by splitting the community of agents into alliances. We combined classical negotiation mechanisms with the acquaintance models and social knowledge techniques in order to reduce the communication traffic and to keep the privacy of knowledge. Experimental results are discussed in the paper.