Measuring agreement and harmony in multi-agent societies: A first approach

Abstract

The existence of independent goals is a natural and often desirable characteristic in societies of autonomous agents. Depending on the application, some societies might be more tolerant to independence than others. Nevertheless, agents must have means for negotiate their goals gracefully and efficiently. Indeed, we find in the literature some proposals of goal negotiation Strategies. At the present state of the art, there is a need for frameworks under which one can compare such strategies and study their influence in the social behavior of the agents. We present here some analytical tools to measure the negotiation characteristics in a society. The underlying notions in these tools are the ideas of agreeability and harmony. By agreeability we mean the ability of an agent to adopt the goals of another agent and/or induce their own goals on another agent. Harmony is the global agreeability in a society. We give mathematical definitions for these notions and illustrate how the definitions can be applied to the study of societies at various levels.