next up previous
Next: Modeling of other agents' Up: Issues and Techniques Previous: Reactive vs. Deliberative agents

Local or global perspective

Another issue to consider when building a multiagent system is how much sensor information should be available to the agents. Even if it is feasible within the domain to give the agents a global perspectives of the world, it may be more effective to limit them to local views.

Roychowdhury et al. consider a case of multiple agents sharing a set of identical resources in which they have to learn (adapt) their resource usage policies [67]. Since the agents are identical and do not communicate, if they all have a global view of the current resource usage, they will all move simultaneously to the most under-used resource. However, if they each see a partial picture of the world, then different agents gravitate towards different resources: a preferable effect. Better performance by agents with less knowledge is occasionally summarized by the cliche ``Ignorance is Bliss.''



Peter Stone
Wed Sep 24 11:54:14 EDT 1997