Design of Collective Behavior in Multi-agent Systems

The problem of designing a given social behavior (e.g. cooperation, compromise, negotiation, altruism) in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a well known issue, still there is no general approach to solve it. In fact, there is no general and comprehensive theory connecting the individual behavior of agents with the collective behavior of the MAS. Nonetheless there are theories, which capture some profound aspects of the problem (e.g. game theory [1], theory of implementation of social choice rules [2], satisficing games [3]). Inspired by these theories a high-level model of agent decision mechanism, called virtual games, was developed [4]. The new concept overcomes most of the weaknesses of its predecessors, and provides a tractable solution to the problem.