Using organization knowledge to improve routing performance in wireless multi-agent networks

ABSTRACT Multi-agent systems benefit greatly from an organization design that guides agents in determining when to communicate, how often, with whom, with what priority, and so on. However, this same organization knowledge is not utilized by general-purpose wireless network routing algorithms normally used to support agent communication. We show that incorporating organization knowledge (otherwise available only to the application layer) in the network-layer routing algorithm increases bandwidth available at the application layer by as much as 35 percent. This increased bandwidth is especially important in communication-intensive application settings, such as agent-based sensor networks, where node failures and link dynamics make providing sufficient inter-agent communication especially challenging

Search reduction in hierarchical distributed problem solving

Knoblock and Korf have determined that abstraction can reduce search at a single agent from exponential to linear complexity (Knoblock 1991; Korf 1987). We extend their results by showing how concurrent problem solving among multiple agents using abstraction can further reduce search to logarithmic complexity. We empirically validate our formal analysis by showing that it correctly predicts performance for the Towers of Hanoi problem (which meets all of the assumptions of the analysis). Furthermore, a powerful form of abstraction for large multiagent systems is to group agents into teams, and teams of agents into larger teams, to form an organizational pyramid. We apply our analysis to such an organization of agents and demonstrate the results in a delivery task domain. Our predictions about abstraction's benefits can also be met in this more realistic domain, even though assumptions made in our analysis are violated. Our analytical results thus hold the promise for explaining in general terms many experimental observations made in specific distributed AI systems, and we demonstrate this ability with examples from prior research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42828/1/10726_2005_Article_BF01384251.pd

Agent Technologies for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly seen as a solution to the problem of performing continuous wide-area monitoring in many environmental, security, and military scenarios. The distributed nature of such networks and the autonomous behavior expected of them presents many novel challenges. In this article, we argue that a new synthesis of electronic engineering and agent technology is required to address these challenges, and we describe three examples where this synthesis has succeeded. In more detail, we describe how these novel approaches address the need for communication and computationally efficient decentralized algorithms to coordinate the behavior of physically distributed sensors, how they enable the real-world deployment of sensor agent platforms in the field, and finally, how they facilitate the development of intelligent agents that can autonomously acquire data from these networks and perform information processing tasks such as fusion, inference, and prediction