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.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Huhns, M.N., Singh, M.P.: Managing heterogeneous transaction workflows with cooperating agents. In: Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M. (eds.) Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications and Markets, pp. 219–239. Springer, Berlin (1998)
Jennings, N.R., Faratin, P., Norman, T.J., O’Brien, P., Odgers, B.: Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management. Int. Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence 14(2), 145–189 (2000)
Debenham, J.K.: Managing e-Market Negotiation in Context with a Multiagent System. In: Proceedings Twenty First International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, ES 2002: Applications and Innovations in Expert Systems X, Cambridge UK (December 2002)
Durfee, E.H.: Distributed Problem Solving and Planning. In: Weiss, G. (ed.) Multi-Agent Systems, The MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Dellarocas, C.: Contractual Agent Societies: Negotiated shared context and social control in open multi-agent systems. In: Workshop on Norms and Institutions inMulti-Agent Systems, 4th International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Spain (June 2000)
Galstyan, A., Kolar, S., Lerman, K.: Resource allocation games with changing resource capacities. In: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems AAMAS 2003, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 145–152 (2003)
Kumar, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Verbeek, H.M.W.: Dynamic Work Distribution inWorkflow Management Systems: How to Balance Quality and Performance? Journal of Management Information Systems 18(3), 157–193 (2002)
Jain, A.K., Aparicio, M., Singh, M.P.: Agents for Process Coherence in Virtual Enterprises. Communications of the ACM 42(3), 62–69 (1999)
Wooldridge, M.: Multiagent Systems. Wiley, Chichester (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Debenham, J., Simoff, S. (2005). Managing Collaboration in a Multiagent System. In: Khosla, R., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems. KES 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3683. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11553939_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11553939_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28896-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31990-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)