Title: Coalition utility allocation based on agent's outstanding characteristics

Authors: Yiqin Cao; Ningxia Chen; Xiaosheng Huang; Yong Chen

Addresses: School of Software, East China Jiao Tong University, Nan Chang 330013, Jiangxi, China ' School of Software, East China Jiao Tong University, Nan Chang 330013, Jiangxi, China ' School of Software, East China Jiao Tong University, Nan Chang 330013, Jiangxi, China ' School of Software, East China Jiao Tong University, Nan Chang 330013, Jiangxi, China

Abstract: Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent system (MAS), considering the existing strategies cannot clearly distinguish each agent's contribution in MAS, which may result in coalition's potential instability as well as the low timeliness. In order to tackle the shortage above, this paper, based on belief desire and intention (BDI) model, proposes a novel coalition utility allocation strategy through updating agents' outstanding characteristics. According to different requirements of task, agents are eager to update their outstanding characteristics timely in order to maximise their own benefit and ensure friendly cooperation with other members to finish the task as well. The theoretical analysis and experiments show that by the novel strategy, the utility is reasonably distributed to each agent, what's more, it could improve the agents' adaptation to environment and basically satisfy all kinds of requirements in super-additive task oriented domains, such as the reasonable allocation of benefit among agents; the global optimal solution, which is strong stability, timeliness and distributed.

Keywords: multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; coalition formation; utility allocation; outstanding characteristics; belief desire intention; BDI model.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRIS.2016.080060

International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems, 2016 Vol.8 No.1/2, pp.23 - 30

Received: 23 Dec 2015
Accepted: 11 Feb 2016

Published online: 31 Oct 2016 *

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