Resource Coordination in Single Agent and Multiagent Systems

An intelligent multiagent system includes a number of software agents interacting to solve a problem. Various agents are responsible for planning different tasks. These tasks must be coordinated to solve complex problems. A number of reasons exist for which coordination among the agents is necessary, and numerous issues have to be tackled to achieve efficient coordination. The focus of this paper is resource coordination. An agent requests a resource from another agent when it does not have enough resources to construct a complete plan. We present a cost-benefit analysis that can be performed to determine if the requesting agent receives the requested resource. We present empirical results that demonstrate the relative goal satisfaction achieved in the PRODIGY planner with and without resource coordination. We have implemented a preliminary multiagent system called COMAS (CoOrdination in MultiAgent Systems) that implements resource coordination.