Cooperative solutions to exploration tasks under speed and budget constraints

ABSTRACT

We present a multi-agent system where agents can cooperate to solve a system of dependent tasks, with agents having the capability to explore a solution space and make inferences, as well as query for information under a limited budget. Re-exploration of the solution space only happens when an older solution expires. We investigate the effects of task dependencies, increasing the speed of the agents, the complexity of the problem space, and the query budgets available to agents. Specifically, we evaluate trade-offs between the agent’s speed and query budget. We observe that increasing the speed of a single agent improves the system performance to a certain point only and increasing the number of faster agents may not improve the system performance due to task dependencies. Favouring faster agents during budget allocation enhances the system performance, in line with the “Matthew effect”.

KEYWORDS:

• Task exploration
• cooperative agents
• resource constraints
• multi-agent system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).