Conservative design is the ability of an individual agent to ensure predictability of its overall performance even if some of its actions and interactions may be inherently less predictable or even completely unpredictable. In this paper, we describe the importance of conservative design in cooperative multi-agent systems and briefly characterize the challenges that need to be addressed to achi...

Coordinating multiple agents that need to perform a sequence of actions to maximize a system level reward requires solving two distinct credit assignment problems. First, credit must be assigned for an action taken at time step t that results in a reward at time step t′ > t. Second, credit must be assigned for the contribution of agent i to the overall system performance. The first credit assig...

Enabling interactions of agent-teams and humans is a critical area of research, with encouraging progress in the past few years. However, previous work suffers from three key limitations: (i) limited human situational awareness, reducing human effectiveness in directing agent teams, (ii) the agent team’s rigid interaction strategies that limit team performance, and (iii) lack of formal tools to...

The design and development of Internet applications can take advantage of a paradigm based on autonomous and mobile agents. However, mobility introduces peculiar coordination problems in multiagent-based Internet applications. First, it suggests the exploitation of an infrastructure based on a multiplicity of local interaction spaces. Second, it may require coordination activities to be adapted...

We consider the problem of coordinating the behavior of multiple self-interested agents. It involves constraint optimization problems that often can only be solved by local search algorithms. Using local search poses problems of incentivecompatibility and individual rationality. We thus define a weaker notion of bounded-rational incentive-compatibility where manipulation is made impossible with...

Building a robust and effective human-agent team is difficult, as teams can fail for many reasons. In this study, we investigated the performance of human-agent teams with divisional and functional team structure under different level of task load uncertainty. Divisional teams show robustness against uncertainly but can lead to poorer performance. Three reasons related to team coordination were...

We consider the problem of learning the meaning of natural language expressions. In contrast to traditional settings, in which agents infer prescribed meanings from observations, we focus on an algorithm for the coordination of meaning among many agents. We do not assume any external correctness criterion. We propose an agent-based iterative algorithm for coordinating the semantics of upward mo...

In particular we address the challenge of im proving the team performance by exploiting the ability to coordinate the actions of the players The advantages of coordination in a soccer play ing scenario can not only be measured in terms of the number of goals scored in the opponents goal but also in the achievement of subgoals such as defending own goal gaining ball possession properly covering ...

Keywords: Multi-agent systems, discrete simulation, simulator The growth of a distributed processing system can increase both the number and likelihood of attacks it may be subject to over its lifetime 14, 7]. This fact, in addition to the complexity inherent in such an environment, makes the survivability of large heterogeneous systems one of the most challenging research areas currently being...