Managing collaboration in a multiagent system

Abstract

In a multiagent system agents negotiate with one another to distribute the work in an attempt to balance the incompatible goals of optimising the quality of the result, optimising system performance, maximising payoff, providing opportunities for poor performers to improve and balancing workload. This distribution of work is achieved by the delegation of responsibility for sub-processes by one agent to another. This leads to estimates of the probability that one agent is a better choice than another. The probability of delegating responsibility to an agent is then expressed as a function of these probability estimates. This apparently convoluted probabilistic method is easy to compute and gives good results in process management applications even when successive payoff measurements are unpredictably varied. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.