A Metalevel Coordination Strategy for Reactive Cooperative Planning

First International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Volume

First International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Contents

In this paper, we propose a metalevel coordination strategy to implement an adaptive organization for reactive cooperative planning. The adaptive organization changes its organizational scheme adaptively as a means of coping with the dynamic problem spaces. Preliminary experiments shows that an adaptive organization can be made to the increase efficiency in dynamic problem spaces. The reason for this works is that reducing the degree of freedom in the problem space, while increasing the degree of interaction, demands greater coordination. However, if the number of effective local plans decrease, it would seem likely that if the agents were to have a better metaleve] strategy, they would be better able to search this reduced space efficiently. The metalevel coordination incorporates an agent-wide metalevel heuristic function. In designing the metalevel coordination strategy, we take three aspects of reactive cooperative planning into account. These aspects include: the difference in the degree of achievement in successive turns; the certainty of shared information; and the degree of freedom of choice for agent’s behavior. The adaptive organization works efficiently in cases where the communication cost is relatively expensive.