---
title: "Communicating Effectively in Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems"
authors:
  - "Partha Sarathi Dutta"
  - "Claudia V. Goldman"
  - "Nicholas R. Jennings"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/205"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0205.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2007
pages: "1269-1273"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Communicating Effectively in Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems

Partha Sarathi Dutta, Claudia V. Goldman, Nicholas R. Jennings

*Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1269-1273.

## 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.