Agent heterogeneity and coalition formation: investigating market-based cooperative problem solving

One focus of multi-agent systems research is the notion that complex outcomes or behaviours may be arrived at through the interaction of agents. However, it is still an open question as to how agents in a complex system form coalitions or modules, and how these coalitions self-organize into hierarchies. In this paper, we begin to address this question by investigating agent collaboration in the context of a high-level pattern recognition task. We propose a novel market-based communication protocol, which governs the aggregate behaviour of individual agents and subsequent emergent properties of the system. Based on the Contract Net Protocol, individual agents bid to join coalitions (or solutions to a given problem). An important contribution of this study is the analysis of the role heterogeneous agents play in the formation of coalitions. Using a simple model, we show that by promoting diversity within the agent population it is possible to avoid deadlock or "tie" conditions, which otherwise have to be solved arbitrarily by the deadlocked agents.

[1]  Tony Curzon Price,et al.  Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John H. Holland , 1998, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[2]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Controlling Cooperative Problem Solving in Industrial Multi-Agent Systems Using Joint Intentions , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[3]  W. Arthur.  Positive feedbacks in the economy , 1990 .

[4]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  A Framework for Distributed Problem Solving , 1979, IJCAI.

[5]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Hierarchic Social Entropy: An Information Theoretic Measure of Robot Group Diversity , 2000, Auton. Robots.

[6]  E. B. Baum,et al.  Manifesto for an evolutionary economics of intelligence , 1998 .

[7]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation , 1994, AI Mag..

[8]  G. SmithR..  The Contract Net Protocol , 1980 .

[9]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Market-oriented programming: some early lessons , 1996 .

[10]  W. Hamilton,et al.  The evolution of cooperation. , 1984, Science.

[11]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  Formalizing the Cooperative Problem Solving Process , 1994 .

[12]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Deals Among Rational Agents , 1985, IJCAI.

[13]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Coalition Formation among Bounded Rational Agents , 1995, IJCAI.

[14]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  Introduction to multiagent systems , 2001 .

[15]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Methods for Task Allocation via Agent Coalition Formation , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[16]  Russell Smith.  The contract net protocol , 1980 .

[17]  Barbara Messing,et al.  An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems , 2002, Künstliche Intell..

[18]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Coalitions Among Computationally Bounded Agents , 1997, Artif. Intell..

[19]  G. Hardin,et al.  The Tragedy of the Commons , 1968, Green Planet Blues.

[20]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Foundations of distributed artificial intelligence , 1996, Sixth-generation computer technology series.