Investigating the Adaptiveness of Communication in Multi-Agent Behavior Coordination

Authors:
Paul Schermerhorn;Matthias Scheutz
Affiliations:
Cognitive Science Program and School of Informatics,Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47406, USA;Cognitive Science Program and School of Informatics,Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47406, USA
Venue:
Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
Year:
2007

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Abstract

Some previous studies of the adaptiveness of communication forcoordination have found communication beneficial, others have not.We claim that this results from the lack of a systematicexamination of important variables such as communication range,sensory range, and environmental conditions. We present anextensive series of simulations exploring how these parameterseffect the utility of communication for coordination in themulti-agent territory exploration (MATE( n)) task.MATE(n) requires agents to visit all checkpoints in theenvironment in as little time as possible; n agents must beat a checkpoint simultaneously for it to be counted "visited." Acomparison of the absolute performance of communicating andnon-communicating agents on MATE(n) (i.e., performancewithout regard to cost) finds that communication can be beneficial.A subsequent analysis of the results establishes constraints on thecost of communication for it to provide relative performancebenefit (i.e., absolute performance scaled by cost).