Towards autonomous mobile agents with emergent migration behaviour

  • Authors:

  • Tino Schlegel;Peter Braun;Ryszard Kowalczyk

  • Affiliations:

  • Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

  • Venue:
  • AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Along with manifold advantages of distributed multi-agent systems, increased network traffic produced by highly communicative agents in large distributed systems has to be considered as their practical downside. We suggest to apply the programming paradigm of mobile agents to reduce this network overhead by allowing agents to meet at the same network node before commencing communication. A remote communication between two agents could then be replaced by one or two agent migrations, followed by local communication. Since only in trivial cases it is possible to decide at design time whether remote communication or agent migration with subsequent local communication would perform better, this decision has to be made at run-time based on environmental parameters and agents' past experience. We present an adaptive approach, which is inspired by a solution of the El Farol problem. Every agent forecasts the network load of the next communication step and applies a simple mathematical model to decide between the two alternatives at run-time. In addition, our approach does not only consider network load but also server load by enabling agents to dynamically forecast the number of agents migrating to a specific agent server. The approach is evaluated with simulation experiments in static and dynamic server load environments.