Decentralized partner finding in multi-agent systems

One of the most compelling characteristics of multi agent systems is the ability to form coalitions to share their resources, create plans, share execution of tasks, etc. The work presented in this article offers scalable methods for finding potential coalition partners when not all agents in a large multi-agent system are known to the agents in need of help to achieve their goals. A new algorithm for finding partners in a MAS, based on concepts inspired by peer-to-peer networks, is described. The proposed algorithm design aims to provide a new, completely decentralized scheme that can be used by agents to gather information needed to make decisions about potential partners. The proposed algorithm is competitive with centralized approaches in smaller multi-agent systems and provides better scalability for larger systems.

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