Coordination in distributed multi-agent system using type-2 fuzzy decision systems

Coordination is one of the key components in distributed multi-agent systems. Establishing a coordination scheme with minimum communication requirements and robustness to communication failure is a difficult task. A new multi-agent architecture based on type-2 fuzzy decision making is proposed here for achieving coordination with minimum communication. The decision making module has been designed to achieve the coordination between agents by calculating the weight of the input to be used for deciding on the action plans in a dynamic manner. The effectiveness of the coordination scheme proposed was tested by applying it to a complex, non-linear and stochastic application of the traffic signal control. The size of the network chosen also serves to show the scalability of the agent architecture. The results obtained were compared with adaptive systems, fixed coordination schemes and no coordination schemes. Considerable improvement in the time delay was achieved while using the dynamic coordination scheme proposed.