Conflict handling in collaborative search

We present an overview of the different kinds of conflicts arising in knowledge-based multi-agent search systems and the methods employed to deal with these conflicts. Based on an application-domain independent definition of sequential search processes, search agents and multi-agent search systems, we characterize three main ideas that are used to develop multi-agent search systems to solve given search problems, namely adding communication and cooperation to the competition approach, working on a common search state, and dividing the given problem into subproblems. For each of these ideas we describe several subtypes of multi-agent search systems based on the ideas and we collect the types of conflicts arising in these subtypes. For each type of conflicts we present the ideas used in literature to resolve these conflicts. Finally, we briefly sketch the requirements, advantages, and disadvantages of the three basic ideas for distributing search among agents and their subtypes.

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