Dynamic Coalition of Resource-Bounded Autonomous Agents

A considerable amount of attention has been paid to the coalition formation problem to deal efficiently with tasks needing more than one agent. However, little attention has been paid to the problem of monitoring a coalition during the execution by modifying it according to the progress of the accomplishment of the task. In this paper, we consider a coalition of resource-bounded autonomous agents with anytime behavior solving a common complex task. There is no central control component. Agents can observe the effect of the other agents´ actions. They can decide whether they should continue to contribute in solving the common task or to stop their contribution and to leave the coalition. This decision is made in a distributed way. The objective is to avoid the waste of resources and time by using the same coalition along the task accomplishment while some agents become not necessary to pursue the accomplishment of the task. We formalize this decentralized decision making problem as a DEC-MDP.