Collaborative Situated Agents for Baseline Logistics Problems on the Packet-World Testbed

EasyChair Preprint no. 5578

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) enable the efficient solution of complex real world problems with flexibility and robustness to system  perturbations. However, the implementation of these systems is nontrivial and requires careful consideration into software design principles, in support of the attractive properties of MAS. To this end, three key problems within MAS have been solved in this paper, namely autonomous navigation, energy management, and multi-agent coordination and cooperation. Grid search, gradient methods, and protocol-based communication are proposed as a means to enable autonomous situated agents to tackle the aforementioned tasks. The solutions are implemented on Packet-World (PW), a testbed for experimentation with situated MAS, meant to be used to investigate and evaluate different perception, decision making, and communication aspects among agents that are situated in a virtual environment. The proposed solutions are evaluated with regard to total energy consumption and/or number of cycles for completing a run averaged across batch runs.

Keyphrases: gradients, multi-agent systems, Packet-World, protocol-based communication, situated agents

@Booklet{EasyChair:5578,
  author = {Georgios Kouros and Gregoris Malekos and Bolat Tleubayev and Victor Van Wymeersch},
  title = {Collaborative Situated Agents for Baseline Logistics Problems on the Packet-World Testbed},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 5578},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}