An Extended Multi-agent Coalitions Mechanism with Constraints

Souhila Arib, Samir Aknine

2020

Abstract

In multiple realistic scenarios, limited agent capabilities may negatively affect task performance. To overcome this, multi-agent cooperation may be required. Many studies have focused on cooperative task performance. To facilitate such cooperation, we develop and evaluate a coalition mechanism that enables agents to participate in concurrent tasks achievement in competitive situations, in which agents have several constraints. We consider a set of self-interested bounded-rational agents, each of which has a set of tasks, that leads an agent to achieving its goal. The agents have not a priori knowledge about the preferences of their opponents. All the agents have their specific constraints and this information is private. In this paper, we do not deal with the negotiation protocol but just introduce a new coalition formation mechanism (CF M ) that imposes minimal sharing of private information to ease negotiations. Specifically, we only require that agents share preferences over their constraints. The agents negotiate for coalition formation over these constraints, that may be relaxed during negotiations. They start by exchanging their constraints and making proposals, which represent their acceptable solutions, until either an agreement is reached, or the negotiation terminates. We explore two techniques that ease the search of suitable coalitions: we use a constraint-based model and a heuristic search method. We describe a procedure that transforms these constraints into a structured graph on which the agents rely during their negotiations to generate a graph of feasible coalitions. This graph is therefore explored by a Nested Monte-Carlo search algorithm to generate the best coalitions and to minimize the negotiation time.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Arib S. and Aknine S. (2020). An Extended Multi-agent Coalitions Mechanism with Constraints. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-395-7, pages 199-207. DOI: 10.5220/0008969001990207

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart20,
author={Souhila Arib and Samir Aknine},
title={An Extended Multi-agent Coalitions Mechanism with Constraints},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2020},
pages={199-207},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008969001990207},
isbn={978-989-758-395-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - An Extended Multi-agent Coalitions Mechanism with Constraints
SN - 978-989-758-395-7
AU - Arib S.
AU - Aknine S.
PY - 2020
SP - 199
EP - 207
DO - 10.5220/0008969001990207