Switching behavioral strategies for effective team formation by autonomous agent organization

In this work, we propose agents that switch their behavioral strategy between rationality and reciprocity depending on their internal states to achieve efficient team formation. With the recent advances in computer science, mechanics, and electronics, there are an increasing number of applications with services/goals that are achieved by teams of different agents. To efficiently provide these services, the tasks to achieve a service must be allocated to agents that have the required capabilities and the agents must not be overloaded. Conventional distributed allocation methods often lead to conflicts in large and busy environments because high-capability agents are likely to be identified as the best team member by many agents, resulting in inefficiency of the entire system due to concentration of task allocation. Our proposed agents switch their strategies in accordance with their local evaluation to avoid conflicts occurring in busy environments. They also establish an organization in which a number of groups are autonomously generated in a bottom-up manner on the basis of dependability in order to avoid the conflict in advance while ignoring tasks allocated by undependable/unreliable agents. We experimentally evaluate our proposed method and analyze the structure of the organization that the agents established.