DEPINT: Dependence-Based Coalition Formation in an Open Multi-Agent Scenario

This paper presents the main features and some simulation results for the DEPINT system, a multi-agent system conceived to illustrate some essential aspects of a social reasoning mechanism (Sichman, 1995), based on the notion of social dependence (Castelfranchi et al., 1992). This social reasoning mechanism is considered to be an essential building block of really autonomous agents, immersed in an open multi-agent system (MAS) context, i.e., where agents may dynamically enter or leave the society, without any global control. As the adaptation of an agent in such a scenario concerns, dependence relations allow an agent to know which of his goals are achievable and which of his plans are feasible at any moment. This way, an agent may dynamically choose a goal to pursuit and a plan to achieve it, being sure that every skill needed to accomplish the selected plan is available in the society. Concerning coalition formation, this model introduces the notion of dependence situation, which allows an agent to evaluate the susceptibility of other agents to adopt his goals, since agents are not necessarily supposed to be benevolent and therefore automatically adopt the goals of each other. Finally, as regardsbelief revision, the social reasoning mechanism allows an agent to detect that his representation of the others is inconsistent. Because agents' interactions are guided by their information about the others, it is exactly during these interactions that they may detect that this information is either incorrect or incomplete, and eventually revise it.