Adaptive Behavior

 

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Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 15, No. 4, 423-445 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1059712307084690

Investigating the Adaptiveness of Communication in Multi-Agent Behavior Coordination

Paul Schermerhorn

Cognitive Science Program and School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47406, USA, pscherme{at}indiana.edu

Matthias Scheutz

Cognitive Science Program and School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47406, USA, mscheutz{at}cse.nd.edu

Some previous studies of the adaptiveness of communication for coordination have found communication beneficial, others have not. We claim that this results from the lack of a systematic examination of important variables such as communication range, sensory range, and environmental conditions. We present an extensive series of simulations exploring how these parameters effect the utility of communication for coordination in the multi-agent territory exploration (MATE( n)) task. MATE(n) requires agents to visit all checkpoints in the environment in as little time as possible; n agents must be at a checkpoint simultaneously for it to be counted "visited." A comparison of the absolute performance of communicating and non-communicating agents on MATE(n) (i.e., performance without regard to cost) finds that communication can be beneficial. A subsequent analysis of the results establishes constraints on the cost of communication for it to provide relative performance benefit (i.e., absolute performance scaled by cost).

Key Words: communicating agents • behavior coordination • cost tradeoffs


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