AN AGENT DECISION SUPPORT MODULE BASED ON GRANULAR ROUGH MODEL

Abstract

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a branch of distributed artificial intelligence, composed of a number of distributed and autonomous agents. In a MAS, effective coordination is essential for autonomous agents to achieve their goals. Any decision based on a foundation of knowledge and reasoning can lead agents into successful cooperation; to achieve the necessary degree of flexibility in coordination, an agent must decide when to coordinate and which coordination mechanism to use. The performance of any MAS depends directly on the decisions made by the agents. The agents must therefore be able to make correct decisions. This paper proposes a decision support module in a distributed MAS that is concerned with two main decisions: the decision needed to allocate a task to specific agent/s and the decision needed to select the appropriate coordination mechanism when agents must coordinate with other agent/s to accomplish a specific task. An algorithm for the task allocation decision maker (TADM) and the coordination mechanism selection decision maker (CMSDM) algorithm are proposed that are based on the granular rough model (GRM). Furthermore, a number of experiments were performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms; the efficiency of the proposed algorithms is compared with recent works. The preliminary results demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.