Abstract
This paper explores how the members of an agent team can jointly deliberate on providing direct help to each other with an intended benefit to team performance. By direct help we mean assistance between teammates that is initiated by them as need arises, rather than being imposed by the general organization of the team or by a centralized decision. The deliberation starts with a request for help in some approaches and with an offer of help in others; it is typically effected through a bidding protocol. We examine the existing principles and designs of help deliberation and propose a new protocol, which refines and combines two existing versions into one. The new protocol allows an agent to initiate help deliberation by either a request or an offer, and to simultaneously engage in both providing and receiving assistance. We demonstrate its potential performance gains over the previous versions through simulation experiments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alemi, O., Polajnar, D., Polajnar, J., Mubaiwala, D.: A simulation framework for design-oriented studies of interaction models in agent teamwork. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium (ADS 2014), pp. 28–35. Society for Computer Simulation International, April 2014
Dunne, P.E., van der Hoek, W., Kraus, S., Wooldridge, M.: Cooperative boolean games. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2008), pp. 1015–1022 (2008)
Gal, Y., Grosz, B., Kraus, S., Pfeffer, A., Shieber, S.: Agent decision-making in open mixed networks. Artif. Intell. 174(18), 1460–1480 (2010)
Grossi, D., Turrini, P.: Dependence theory via game theory. In: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), pp. 1147–1154 (2010)
Kamar, E., Gal, Y., Grosz, B.J.: Incorporating helpful behavior into collaborative planning. In: Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems/Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pp. 875–882 (2009)
LePine, J.A., Hanson, M.A., Borman, W.C., Motowidlo, S.J.: Contextual performance and teamwork: implications for staffing. In: Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, vol. 19, pp. 53–90 (2000)
Nalbandyan, N., Polajnar, J., Mumbaiwala, D., Polajnar, D., Alemi, O.: Requester vs. helper-initiated protocols for mutual assistance in agent teamwork. In: The Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2013), Manchester, UK, pp. 2741–2746, October 2013
Polajnar, J., Malek Akhlagh, M., Nalbandyan, N., Mumbaiwala, D., Polajnar, D.: Decentralized reactive adjustment of agent teamwork organization to changing environment. In: The Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2014), San Diego, California, pp. 1457–1462, October 2014
Polajnar, J., Nalbandyan, N., Alemi, O., Polajnar, D.: An interaction protocol for mutual assistance in agent teamwork. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Complex, Interactive, and Software-Intensive Systems (CISIS 2012), Palermo, Italy, pp. 6–11, July 2012
Sichman, J.S., Conte, R., Demazeau, Y., Castelfranchi, C.: A social reasoning mechanism based on dependence networks. In: 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 1994), pp. 188–192 (1994)
Smith, R.G.: The contract net protocol: high-level communication and control in a distributed problem solver. IEEE Trans. Comput. 29, 1104–1113 (1980)
Acknowledgments
We thank Narek Nalbandyan, Desanka Polajnar, and the anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Malek Akhlagh, M., Polajnar, J. (2015). Distributed Deliberation on Direct Help in Agent Teamwork. In: Bulling, N. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8953. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17130-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17130-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17129-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17130-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)