Cooperative behavior generation method using local communication for distributed multi-agent systems

An effective distributed multi-agent system using local communication is proposed in this paper, which employs a state-based approach and achieves a complex task without any centralized agent. In general, many researches on cooperative multi-agent system employ a centralized approach which uses a centralized agent as supervisor. However, it has drawbacks that it is weak for a failure of the centralized agent and the task management becomes difficult as the number of agents increases. We propose a distributed-type cooperative multi-agent system in which tasks of each agent are arranged effectively by using local information. In the proposed model, each agent determines effective actions by using a situation of a whole system estimated from a local communication between neighboring agents. The proposed system offers a low computing cost and effective cooperative actions. The performance of the proposed system is confirmed by computer simulations on surrounding task.