This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Murciano, A. Articles by Millán, J. d. R. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Learning Signaling Behaviors and Specialization in Cooperative Agents

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

José del R. Millán

Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety

In this article, we present a learning mechanism that allows a multiagent system to cooperate to achieve a gathering task efficiently in unknown and changing environments. The multiagent system is a team of autonomous behavior-based agents with limited communication capabilities. Cooperation is based on the acquisition of signaling behaviors and on the specialization of the agents into different types. Every agent has the same collection of built-in reactive behaviors. Some of the built-in behaviors are fixed, whereas others can be modified through reinforcement learning. The reinforcement signal is delayed until a trial is completed and assesses the collective performance of the team. Each agent uses this common signal to learn what individual behaviors are more suitable for the team. Simulation results, and the corresponding statistical analysis, show that the multiagent system always achieves near-optimal performances.

Key Words: reinforcement learning • multiagent systems • cooperation; specialization

Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 5, No. 1, 5-28 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/105971239600500102


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?