Multi-agent role allocation: issues, approaches, and multiple perspectives

In cooperative multi-agent systems, roles are used as a design concept when creating large systems, they are known to facilitate specialization of agents, and they can help to reduce interference in multi-robot domains. The types of tasks that the agents are asked to solve and the communicative capabilities of the agents significantly affect the way roles are used in cooperative multi-agent systems. Along with a discussion of these issues about roles in multi-agent systems, this article compares computational models of the role allocation problem, presents the notion of explicitly versus implicitly defined roles, gives a survey of the methods used to approach role allocation problems, and concludes with a list of open research questions related to roles in multi-agent systems. Keywords Multi-agent systems, Role allocation, Task allocation

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: Adam Campbell, Annie S. Wu
• Keywords: AAMAS 2011, Cooperative Multi-agent Systems, Intelligent Agents, Multi-agent Systems, Role Allocation