Coalition Formation Among Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents working in multi-agent environments may need to cooperate in order to ful ll tasks. Given a set of agents and a set of tasks which they have to satisfy, we consider situations where each task should be attached to a group of agents which will perform the task. The allocation of tasks to groups of agents is necessary when tasks cannot be performed by a single agent. It may also be useful to assign groups of agents to tasks when the group's performance is more e cient than the performance of single agents. In this paper we give an e cient solution to the problem of task allocation among autonomous agents, and suggest that the agents willformcoalitionsin order to perform tasks or improve the e ciency. We present a distributed algorithmwith a low ratio bound and with a low computational complexity. Our algorithm is an any-time algorithm, it is simple, e cient and easy to implement.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: MAAMAW
• Authors: Steven P. Ketchpel
• Keywords: Autonomous Agents, Intelligent Agents, MAAMAW 1993, Multi-agent Environments, Single Agents