Towards Reducing Communication Traffic In Multi-Agent Systems

This paper is aimed at acquaintance-based methodology for reducing communication traffic in multiagent systems. We present a tri-base acquaintance model as a computational model of agents’ mutual awareness focused at reduction of the communication traffic in the system’s critical time. The model contains three separate knowledge structures for representing agents' permanent, semi-permanent and temporary knowledge, respectively, and mechanism for administering, maintenance and exploration of the knowledge. A simple measure helping to evaluate volumes of communication traffic needed in different communication phases of a multi-agent community has been proposed. The paper explains how utilisation of an acquaintance model contributes to communication savings and to reduction of overall distributed problem solving complexity. We report results of experiments carried out on the community of decomposition agents, all members of ProPlanT multi-agent system for project-oriented production planning.