Distributed search by Self-interested Agents

Speaker: Amnon Meisels, Ben-Gurion University

Abstract: Distributed search by agents is an important topic of distributed AI. In the last decade, a sizable body of work on distributed constrained search has imerged - Distributed Constraints Reasoning (DCR). The talk will cover telegraphically the definition of DCRs and will focus on situations where the DCR agents are self-interested, closely related to multi-agent systems (MAS). The natural framework for representing such situations will be described —Asymmetric DCOPs—and the resulting model of a Graphical Game. An example graphical game of file sharing will be presented, where a new search method produces better results than the game theoretic ones. Some new results on partial cooperation will be presented, if time permits.