An empirical evaluation of communication effectiveness in autonomous reactive multiagent systems

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an experiment designed to measure the effect of collaborative communication on task performance of a multiagent system. A simulation of a multiagent environment modeled after a bee colony examined the effects of collaboration through communication for various numbers of agents and environment sizes. Results show that collaboration enables a smaller number of agents to perform as well as a significantly larger number of agents without coordination. In particular, results indicate that the biologically inspired communication model of the bee is a particularly effective method of agent communication and collaboration.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems

General Terms:
Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
multi-agent collaboration