Evolving intelligent multiagent systems using unsupervised agent communication and behavior training

Multiagent systems in which independent software agents interact with each other to achieve common goals, complete distributed tasks concurrently under autonomous control. Agent communication has been shown to be an important factor in coordinating efficient group behavior in agents. Most research on training or evolving group behavior in multiagent systems used predefined agent communication protocols. Designing agent communication becomes a complex problem in dynamic and large-scale systems. In order to solve this problem, in our previous research we proposed a method applying genetic programming techniques, in particular Automatically Defined Function Genetic Programming (ADF-GP) (K. Mackin and E. Tazaki, 1999), to allow agents to autonomously learn effective agent communication messaging. For this research we take this approach further and combine training of the agent behavior as well as the communication protocol. By training both behavior and communication we expect to further optimize the system performance. A software simulation of a multiagent transaction system is used to observe the effectiveness of the proposed method.