Towards the control of emergence by the coordination of decentralized agent activity for the resource sharing problem

Abstract

Explicit and high semantic level communications are not always the best approaches to coordinate the global system activity in the context of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Insect societies take advantage of a stigmergic way to communicate which does not require centralized control, but enable insects to coordinate their complex global tasks. In this paper, we describe and motivate a new approach to elaborate Complex Exchanges between Stigmergic Negotiating Agents (CESNA), for the critical resource sharing problem. We describe a negotiating network as a generic and suitable representation of the problem, along with its implemented behaviours. We present some promising results and attempt a first interpretation of how this decentralized system leads local behaviours to a global problem solution. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.