Skip to main content

Comparing Three Approaches to Large-Scale Coordination

  • Chapter

Summary

Coordination of large groups of agents or robots is starting to reach a level of maturity where prototype systems can be built and tested in realistic environments. These more realistic systems require that both algorithmic and practical issues are addressed in an integrated solution. In this chapter, we look at three implementations of large-scale coordination examining common issues, approaches, and open problems. The key result of the comparison is that there is a surprising degree of commonality between the independently developed approaches, in particular the use of partial, dynamic centralization. Conversely, open issues and problems encountered varied greatly with the notable exception that debugging was a major issue for each approach.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Hans Chalupsky, Yolanda Gil, Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Jean Oh, David V. Pynadath, Thomas A. Russ, and Milind Tambe. Electric Elves: Agent technology for supporting human organizations. AI Magazine, 23(2): 11–24, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  2. P. Cheeseman, B. Kanefsky, and W. Taylor. Where the really hard problems are. In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), pages 331–337, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Philip R. Cohen and Hector J. Levesque. Teamwork. Nous, 25(4):487–512, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Joseph Culberson and Ian Gent. Frozen development in graph coloring. Theoretical Computer Science, 265(l–2):227–264, 2001.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  5. Alessandro Farinelli, Paul Scerri, and Milind Tambe. Building large-scale robot systems: Distributed role assignment in dynamic, uncertain domains. In Proceedings of Workshop on Representations and Approaches for Time-Critical Decentralized Resource, Role and Task Allocation, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Mark S. Fox, Norman Sadeh, and Can Baycan. Constrained heuristic search. In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-89), volume 1, pages 309–316, Detroit, MI, August 1989. Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  7. J. Giampapa and K. Sycara. Conversational case-based planning for agent team coordination. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Barbara Grosz and Sarit Kraus. Collaborative plans for complex group actions. Artificial Intelligence, 86:269–358, 1996”.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Nick Jennings. Controlling cooperative problem solving in industrial multi-agent systems using joint intentions. Artificial Intelligence, 75:195–240, 1995.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Hiraoki Kitano, Minoru Asada, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Itsuki Noda, Eiichi Osawa, and Hitoshi Matsubara. RoboCup: A challenge problem for AI. AI Magazine, 18(1):73–85, Spring 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kurt Konolige, Dieter Fox, Charlie Ortiz, Andrew Agno, Michael Eriksen, Benson Limketkai, Jonathan Ko, Benoit Morisset, Dirk Schulz, Benjamin Stewart, and Regis Vincent. Centibots: Very large scale distributed robotic teams. In Proc. of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Roger Mailler, Victor Lesser, and Bryan Horling. Cooperative Negotiation for Soft Real-Time Distributed Resource Allocation. In Proceedings of Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2003), pages 576–583, Melbourne, July 2003. ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Steven Minton, Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Philips, and Philip Laird. Minimizing conflicts: A heuristic repair method for constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems. Artificial Intelligence, 58(l–3):161–205, 1992.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Pragnesh Jay Modi, Hyuckchul Jung, Milind Tambe, Wei-Min Shen, and Shriniwas Kulkarni. Dynamic distributed resource allocation: A distributed constraint satisfaction approach. In John-Jules Meyer and Milind Tambe, editors, Pre-proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-2001), pages 181–193, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Remi Monasson, Riccardo Zecchina, Scott Kirkpatrick, Bart Selman, and Lidror Troyansky. Determining computational complexity from characteristic ‘phase transitions’. Nature, 400:133–137, 1999.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. R. Nair, T. Ito, M. Tambe, and S. Marsella. Task allocation in robocup rescue simulation domain. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on RoboCup, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  17. David V. Pynadath and Milind Tambe. An automated teamwork infrastructure for heterogeneous software agents and humans. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Special Issue on Infrastructure and Requirements for Building Research Grade Multi-Agent Systems, page to appear, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  18. D.V. Pynadath, M. Tambe, N. Chauvat, and L. Cavedon. Toward team-oriented programming. In Intelligent Agents VI: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 233–247, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  19. P. Scerri, E. Liao, Yang. Xu, M. Lewis, G. Lai, and K. Sycara. Theory and Algorithms for Cooperative Systems, chapter Coordinating very large groups of wide area search munitions. World Scientific Publishing, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  20. P. Scerri, D. V. Pynadath, L. Johnson, P. Rosenbloom, N. Schurr, M Si, and M. Tambe. A prototype infrastructure for distributed robot-agent-person teams. In The Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  21. P. Scerri, Yang. Xu, E. Liao, J. Lai, and K. Sycara. Scaling teamwork to very large teams. In Proceedings of AAMAS’04, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  22. K. Sycara and M. Lewis. Team Cognition, chapter Integrating Agents into Human Teams. Erlbaum Publishers, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Milind Tambe. Agent architectures for flexible, practical teamwork. National Conference on AI (AAAI97), pages 22–28, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Jim Waldo. The Jini architecture for network-centric computing. Communications of the ACM, 42(7):76–82, 1999.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Guandong Wang, Weixiong Zhang, Roger Mailler, and Victor Lesser. Analysis of Negotiation Protocols by Distributed Search, pages 339–361. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Y. Xu, M. Lewis, K. Sycara, and P. Scerri. Information sharing in very large teams. In In AAMAS’04 Workshop on Challenges in Coordination of Large Scale MultiAgent Systems, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Makoto Yokoo. Asynchronous weak-commitment search for solving distributed constraint satisfaction problems. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-95), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 976, pages 88–102. Springer-Verlag, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Makoto Yokoo, Edmund H. Durfee, Toru Ishida, and Kazuhiro Kuwabara. Distributed constraint satisfaction for formalizing distributed problem solving. In International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 614–621, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Scerri, P., Vincent, R., Mailler, R. (2006). Comparing Three Approaches to Large-Scale Coordination. In: Scerri, P., Vincent, R., Mailler, R. (eds) Coordination of Large-Scale Multiagent Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-27972-5_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-27972-5_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-26193-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-27972-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics