A General Framework for Multi-agent Search with Individual and Global Goals: Stakeholder Search

Stakeholder search is a general framework for an extension to the improving on the competition approach paradigm for cooperative search that allows for additional individual goals of the search agents. This framework defines a whole spectrum of possibilities for search systems. Based on a scheme defining interactions, search agents use a given strategy (ranging from cooperative to competitive) to find good solutions for the global search goal that are also good for their individual goals. A stakeholder search system was created to solve instances of the package delivery problem. Experiments with search agents using either a cooperative, a competitive or a stakeholder strategy, between the two extremes, showed that the stakeholder strategy was effective at finding solutions which satisfied both the global goal and many of the individual agent’s goals.