Distributed Protocols for Multi-Agent Coalition Formation: A Negotiation Perspective

We investigate collaborative multi-agent systems and how they can use simple, scalable negotiation protocols to coordinate in a fully decentralized manner. Specifically, we study multi-agent

distributed coalition formation

. We summarize our past and ongoing research on collaborative coalition formation and describe our original distributed coalition formation algorithm. The present paper focuses on negotiation-based view of coalition formation in collaborative

Multi-Agent Systems

(MAS). While negotiation protocols have been extensively studied in the context of competitive, self-interested agents, we argue that negotiation-based approach may be potentially very useful in the context of collaborative agents, as well – as long as those agents, due to limitations of their sensing and communication abilities, have different views of and preferences over the states of the world. In particular, we show that our coalition formation algorithm has several important, highly desirable properties when viewed as a negotiation protocol.