Token Based Resource Sharing in Heterogeneous Multi-agent Teams

  • Authors:

  • Yang Xu;Paul Scerri

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 610054;School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA 15213

  • Venue:
  • PRIMA '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In a cooperative heterogeneous multiagent team, distributed agents are required to harmonize activities and make the best use of resources to achieve their common goal. Agents are required to share their resource with very a few of the teammates who need it but with a limited view of the team, they do not know who they are. In this paper, we put forward our resource sharing algorithm for a large heterogeneous team. It does not require a complete view of the team or depend on excessive communication. Agents only make use of the knowledge from allocating tasks or sharing the other resources. The key is that we use influence diagram to model how agents may predict what the other agents are doing from their limited information received. By utilizing the relevances between tasks and resources or pairs of resources, We have setup a local probability model so that agents can reason in the uncertainty and can efficiently share the resource within a few hops to its target. Based on this model, we have two additional designs of dynamic threshold and local decision exchange model so that agents can enhance their local decisions and greatly increase the resource sharing performance. Our experiment results show this system design is feasible for resource sharing in a large heterogeneous multiagent team.