The Research On Communication And Cooperation Mechanism In Multi-Agent System

Attention has been paid to the research on Agent and Multi-Agent System (MAS) because MAS is an important branch of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and has become a hot spot of Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 1990s. MAS has been extensively applied to Automatic Control, Distributed Treatment of Information and Intelligent Expert System. The realization of MAS involves organization structure, communication, development method and programming language etc.Just as language and words are the most important communication means for human beings, communication is an important method and the basis for cooperating and negotiating among Agents. If there is no communication, there will be no cooperation and negotiation. Communication driven by Agent thinking state is a process of information exchange, it reflects social nature by making Agent perceive environment and enhance ability of behavior. This thesis introduced BDI-Based-KQML (including some concepts about Psychology and Anthropology behavior), which overcomes ambiguity in Agent design and communication caused by lacking efficient expression between grammar structure and word meaning of pure KQML. After comparing BDI-Based-KQML to KQML on effect of semantic description, the thesis discussed the method and construction of communication and posed MAS communication architecture based on CORBA, and then elaborated its workflow in detail.Cooperation- and negotiation is the kernel of MAS. Each Agent that has different goal in MAS must cooperate with each other according to its resources. So how to dealing with cooperation in MAS by referring to the theories of economics and sociology is an important issue. This thesis discussed the model, pattern and workflow of negotiation in MAS, then introduced a market-based cooperation mechanism and extended reasoning pattern to thinking state. This mechanism stimulates not only the cooperation but also the competition among Agents through public bid. At last, the thesis devised a pseudocode description for a cooperation and negotiation process about a negotiation issue.The research on cooperation and negotiation mechanism of Multi-Agent System in this thesis will create and bring about convenience for devising and developing MAS.