Effective task allocation and stable cooperative organization based on behavioral strategy selection

Abstract

This paper proposes a behavioral strategy with which agents select rational or reciprocal behavior depending on the past cooperative activities. Rational behavioral strategy lets agents select actions to try to maximize the direct and immediate rewards, while agents with the reciprocal behavioral strategy try to work with cooperative partners for steady task execution. Although rational action is effective in team formation for group work in an unbusy environment, it may cause conflicts in busy and large-scale multi-agent systems due to the task concentration to a few high capable agents, resulting in the degradation of entire performance. This also affects the learning mechanism to identify which tasks and/or agents will provide more rewards, by destabilizing the cooperative relationship between agents. Our proposed method enables agents to change the behavioral strategy on the basis of the past members of successful group work. We experimentally show that it finally stabilizes the cooperative relationship between agents and improve the entire performance in busy environments. We also indicate that a certain ratios of rational and reciprocal agents in good performance.