A transitive dependence based social reasoning mechanism for coalition formation

Abstract

Coalition formation in multi-agent systems (MAS) is becoming increasingly important as it increases the ability of agents to execute tasks and maximize their payoffs. This paper proposes a novel dependence theory namely transitive dependence theory for dynamic coalition formation in multi-agent system. Based on the proposed transitive dependence theory, a reasoning mechanism for searching coalition partners has been worked out which includes dependence tree generation, dependence tree reduction, plan optimization and action optimization. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.