in previous papers authors have considered agents as inertia-less self driven particles and designed a flocking algorithm. application of this algorithm to agents with considerable inertial characteristics needs a behavioural controller. the controller uses the local information and helps every agent to imitate the desired behaviour as a member of the flocking frame which covers the main issue ...

Distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) has emerged as a key technique for multiagent coordination. Unfortunately, while previous work in DCOP focuses on optimizing a single team objective, domains often require satisfying additional criteria. This paper provides a novel multi-criteria DCOP algorithm, based on two key ideas: (i) transforming multi-criteria problems via virtual variables to h...

The effective and reliable coordination of agent activities is a momentous problem for Multi–Agent System (MAS) developers. Particularly challenging is the decentralized coordination of agents that enables systems to exhibit self–organization. Natural phenomena typically serve as design metaphors and developers apply Decentralized Coordination Mechanisms (DCMs) that have been inferred from biol...

A new approach of coordination of decisions in a multi site system is proposed. It is based this approach on a multi-agent concept and on the principle of distributed network of enterprises. For this purpose, each enterprise is defined as autonomous and performs simultaneously at the local and global levels. The basic component of our approach is a so-called Virtual Enterprise Node (VEN), where...

In team Markov games research, it is difficult for an individual agent to calculate the reward of collaborative agents dynamically. We present a coordination tree structure whose nodes are agent subsets or an agent. Two kinds of weights of a tree are defined which describe the cost of an agent collaborating with an agent subset. We can calculate a collaborative agent subset and its minimal cost...

Multi Agent System, where multiple agents concurrently and autonomously search to find a target, is regarded as a promising paradigm for future distributed computing. Agents often do not know the terrain in advance but automatically observe it within a certain range around it. In real time heuristic search such as Moving Target search (MTS), we have to commit a move within a limited search hori...

In the framework of fully cooperative multi-agent systems, independent (non-communicative) agents that learn by reinforcement must overcome several difficulties to manage to coordinate. This paper identifies several challenges responsible for the non-coordination of independent agents: Pareto-selection, nonstationarity, stochasticity, alter-exploration and shadowed equilibria. A selection of mu...

The research described in this thesis stems from ROBOCARE1, a three year research project aimed at developing software and robotic technology for providing intelligent support for elderly people. This thesis deals with two problems which have emerged in the course of the project’s development: Multi-agent coordination with scarce resources. Multi-agent planning is concerned with automatically d...