A cooperative agent model by forming a group

Abstract

Recently, multi-agent techniques are studied with keen interest to develop flexible information systems for complicated problems. Especially, rescue systems for serious disasters to decrease damage are required all over the world. RoboCupRescue Project has started since 1999 in Japan. This is an international research project to develop a rescue system for serious disaster. We deal with the rescue agent system. One of great interest for multi-agent techniques is to realize efficient cooperative behavior design. There are traditional works such as cooperative protocols, hierarchical approaches and so on, for frameworks of cooperative behavior design. However, autonomous robot agents such as rescue agents can not communicate each other and form into groups to cooperative in traditional frameworks. Because these agents have mobility and can get only restricted information. Besides, they need to behave in real-time environment which is changing complicatedly and continuously. We defined a cooperative activity clearly and propose a new cooperative model for complicated multi-agent systems like disaster simulation of RoboCupRescue. So, we tried to designed cooperative behaviors of autonomous agents such as rescue agents of RoboCupRescue disaster simulation. As the result of some simulations, we confirmed that our model is efficient for the complicated environment such as the disaster simulation.