Optimal Creation of Agent Coalitions for Manufacturing and Control

keywords: Agents, cooperation, coalition, optimization and multi-agent systems
Cooperation among agents has been the object of many recently published papers. Cooperation might be formulated and work in many forms, between different kinds of agents and situations in which they are situated. In addition, it is also influenced a lot by the agent's intelligence, mutual relationships and the willingness to cooperate with other ones. The main focus of this paper is to solve the problem of how to create optimal coalitions of the given agents with the purpose to improve the collective performance. The coalition is a possible form of cooperation in which the common goal has the highest priority for all members included in it. Further, we introduce methods for finding the sub-optimal solutions, which are able to approximate the range of the optimal solutions. Finally we discuss the problem of creating coalition with more parameters.
reference: Vol. 22, 2003, No. 1, pp. 53–83