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Evolved Gossip Contracts - A Framework for Designing Multi-agent Systems

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Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVI (PPSN 2020)

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are systems of autonomous interacting agents acting in an environment to achieve a common goal. One of the most interesting aspects of multi-agent systems is when they exhibit emergence; where the whole is considered greater than the sum of the parts. Designing multi-agents systems is challenging, and doing this in an automated way has been described as “one of the holy grails of artificial intelligence and agent-based modelling”. In previous research, we presented a novel decentralised cooperation protocol called Gossip Contracts (GC), which is inspired by Contract Net and Gossip Protocol. Here we present Evolved Gossip Contracts (EGC), a new framework which builds on GC and uses evolutionary computing to tailor GC to address a specific problem. We evaluate the EGC framework and the experimental results indicate that it is a promising approach for the automated design of decentralised strategies.

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Correspondence to Nicola Mc Donnell .

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Mc Donnell, N., Howley, E., Duggan, J. (2020). Evolved Gossip Contracts - A Framework for Designing Multi-agent Systems. In: Bäck, T., et al. Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVI. PPSN 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12269. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58112-1_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58112-1_44

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58111-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58112-1

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