VWM: An Improvement to Multiagent Coordination in Highly Dynamic Environments

Authors:
Seyed Hamid Hamraz;Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli;William F. Punch
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran;Department of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, East Lansing, Michigan State University, MI, USA
Venue:
MATES '07 Proceedings of the 5th German conference on Multiagent System Technologies
Year:
2007

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Abstract

This paper is aimed to describe a general improvement over the previous work on the cooperative multiagent coordination. The focus is on highly dynamic environments where the message transfer delay is not negligible. Therefore, the agents shall not count on communicating their intentions along the time they are making the decisions, because this will directly add the communication latencies to the decision making phase. The only way for the agents to be in touch is to communicate and share their beliefs, asynchronously with the decision making procedure. Consequently, they can share similar knowledge and make coordinated decisions based on it. However, in a very dynamic environment, the shared knowledge may not remain similar due to the communication limitations and latencies. This may lead to some inconsistencies in the team coordination performance. Addressing this issue, we propose to hold another abstraction of the environment, called Virtual World Model (VWM), for each agent in addition to its primary internal world state. The primary world state is updated as soon as a new piece of information is received while the information affects the VWM through a synchronization mechanism. The proposed idea has been implemented and tested for Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) RoboCupRescue simulation team, the 3rdwinner of the 2006 worldcup competitions.