{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Communicating Effectively in Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems","authors":[{"name":"Partha Sarathi Dutta","slug":"partha-sarathi-dutta","given":"Partha Sarathi","family":"Dutta","affiliation":""},{"name":"Claudia V. Goldman","slug":"claudia-v-goldman","given":"Claudia V.","family":"Goldman","affiliation":""},{"name":"Nicholas R. Jennings","slug":"nicholas-r-jennings","given":"Nicholas R.","family":"Jennings","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Agents with partial observability need to share information to achieve decentralised coordination. However, in resource-constrained systems, indiscriminate communication can create performance bottlenecks by consuming valuable bandwidth. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between the utility attained by communication and its cost. Here we address this tradeoff by developing a novel strategy to make communication selective based on information redundancy; ensuring communication only occurs when necessary, while maintaining acceptable coordination. We apply this strategy to a state-of-the-art communication protocol to evaluate its resource saving benefit in a distributed network routing problem. Furthermore, we design a mechanism to adapt its selectivity level to the prevailing resource constraints to ensure further improvements. Empirical studies show our selective strategy achieves relative savings in bandwidth usage of 50-90%, with only a 5-10% relative reduction in coordination effectiveness and the adaptive strategy further improves relative bandwidth usage by up to 10% and also relative coordination effectiveness by up to 12% over the non-adaptive approach.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/205","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0205.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/205.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/bibtex/205","volume":{"slug":"2007","title":"Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2007","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/","year":2007,"location":"Hyderabad, India","dates":"","editors":"Ramon López de Mántaras","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":205,"pages":{"first":1269,"last":1273},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}