Negotiator agents for the patrolling task

Abstract

Multi-agent systems can be used to perform patrolling tasks in various domains. In this work, we compare the results obtained by new negotiation based approaches with previous ones. By splitting the nodes of the world graph, the negotiator agents reduce the path they have to walk and the number of nodes to patrol, making it easier to maintain a low average idleness in world nodes. Auctions are the negotiation mechanisms used to split the nodes of the world, the agents bid on nodes based in their utility function. Empirical evaluation has shown the effectiveness of this distributed approach, as the results obtained are substantially better than those previously achieved by negotiator agents. The agent types presented in this work are more scalable and reactive since they can perform patrolling in worlds of all sizes and topology types. Besides, they are more stable as indicated by the low standard deviation obtained in node idleness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.