Towards Collaborative Adaptive Autonomous Agents

Adaptive autonomy enables agents operating in an environment to change, or adapt, their autonomy levels by relying on tasks executed by others. Moreover, tasks could be delegated between agents, and as a result decision-making concerning them could also be delegated. In this work, adaptive autonomy is modeled through the willingness of agents to cooperate in order to complete abstract tasks, the latter with varying levels of dependencies between them. Furthermore, it is sustained that adaptive autonomy should be considered at an agent’s architectural level. Thus the aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, the initial concept of an agent architecture is proposed and discussed from an agent interaction perspective. Secondly, the relations between static values of willingness to help, dependencies between tasks and overall usefulness of the agents’ population are analysed. The results show that a unselfish population will complete more tasks than a selfish one for low dependency degrees. However, as the latter increases more tasks are dropped, and consequently the utility of the population degrades. Utility is measured by the number of tasks that the population completes during run-time. Finally, it is shown that agents are able to finish more tasks by dynamically changing their willingness to cooperate.