On agents' cooperative behavior based on potential field

Abstract

In multiagent system, it is important for agents to assess the situation prevailing in the system, especially to anticipate other agents' intentions. We argue in favor of cooperation among agents and propose a new method to utilize potential field as a tool for estimation of the environment. In our method, potential of environment gives agents some criteria to assess environmental situations from their own perspective. The potential of each object represents its influence on the environment and the environmental potential, i.e., summation of each object's potential, represents global situation of the environment. Agents' decision of their behavior will be done by refining the policy obtained from potential. We use a trash collecting problem as an example to show the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, we show the efficiency of our method by some sets of experiments of the trash collecting problem. We also discuss the applicability of our method to hybrid systems, environments where available information has a margin of error, or environments where agents' range of vision are limited.