Coalition Formation Methods in Multi-Agent Environments

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Student Abstracts

Autonomous agents are designed to reach goals that were pre-defined by their operators. An important way to execute tasks and to maximize utility is to share resources and to cooperate on task execution by creating coalitions of agents. If the agents are individually rational, such coalitions will take place if, and only if, each member of a coalition gains more if it joins the coalition than it could gain previously. There are several ways of creating such coalitions and dividing the joint payoff among the members. Variation in these methods is due to different environments, different settings in a specific environment, and different approaches to a specific environment with specific settings.