Integrating Communicative Action, Conversations and Decision Theory to Coordinate Agents

The coordination problem in multi-agent systems is the problem of managing dependencies between the activities of autonomous agents, in conditions of incomplete knowledge about the dynamically changing environment and about the actions, reactions and goals of the agents populating it, such that to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants and a level of coherence in the behavior of the system as a whole. The paper articulates a precise conceptual model of coordination as structured "conversations" involving communicative actions, amongst agents. The model is extended to a complete language design that provides objects and control structures that substantiate its concepts and allow the construction of real multi-agent systems in industrial domains. To account for the uncertainty of the environment and to capture user's prefernces about the possible actions we integrate decision theoretic elements based on Markov Decision Processes. Finally, to support i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Mihai Barbuceanu, Mark S. Fox
• Keywords: AGENTS 1997, Coordination Knowledge, Coordination Problem, Multi-agent Systems, Security Privacy