Abstract
Coordination isa recurring theme in multiagent systems design.We consider the problem of achieving coordination in a system where the agents make autonomous decisions based solely on local knowledge.An open theoretical issue is what goes into achieving effective coordination? There is some folklore about the importance of the knowledge held by the different agents,but the rest of the rich agent landscape has not been explored in depth.The present paper seeks to delineate the different components of an abstract architecture for agents that influence the effectiveness of coordination.Specifically,it proposes that the extent of the choices available to the agents as well as the extent of the knowledge shared by them are both important for understanding coordination in general.These lead to a richer view of coordination that supports a more intuitive set of claims.This paper supports its conceptual conclusions with experimental results based on simulation.
We are indebted to Sandip Sen for explaining his previous efforts on this topic,and to Jie Xing for useful discussions.We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous version.
Munindar Singh is supported by the NCSU College of Engineering,the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9529179 and IRI-9624425 (Career Award), and IBM corporation.
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Rustogi, S.K., Singh, M.P. (1999). The Bases of Effective Coordination in Decentralized Multi-agent Systems. In: Müller, J.P., Rao, A.S., Singh, M.P. (eds) Intelligent Agents V: Agents Theories, Architectures, and Languages. ATAL 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1555. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49057-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49057-4_10
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