Article

Coalition formation through motivation and trust

Authors:

Nathan Griffiths,

Michael LuckAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

Pages 17 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/860575.860579

Published: 14 July 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Cooperation is the fundamental underpinning of multi-agent systems, allowing agents to interact to achieve their goals. Where agents are self-interested, or potentially unreliable, there must be appropriate mechanisms to cope with the uncertainty that arises. In particular, agents must manage the risk associated with interacting with others who have different objectives, or who may fail to fulfil their commitments. Previous work has utilised the notions of motivation and trust in engendering successful cooperation between self-interested agents. Motivations provide a means for representing and reasoning about agents' overall objectives, and trust offers a mechanism for modelling and reasoning about reliability, honesty, veracity and so forth. This paper extends that work to address some of its limitations. In particular, we introduce the concept of a clan: a group of agents who trust each other and have similar objectives. Clan members treat each other favourably when making private decisions about cooperation, in order to gain mutual benefit. We describe mechanisms for agents to form, maintain, and dissolve clans in accordance with their self-interested nature, along with giving details of how clan membership influences individual decision making. Finally, through some simulation experiments we illustrate the effectiveness of clan formation in addressing some of the inherent problems with cooperation among self-interested agents.

References

[1]

M. E. Bratman. Shared cooperative activity. Philosophical Review, 101(2):327--341, Apr. 1992.]]

[2]

M. E. Bratman, D. Israel, and M. Pollack. Plans and resource-bounded practical reasoning. Computational Intelligence, 4:349--355, 1988.]]

[3]

S. Breban and J. Vassileva. Long-term coalitions for the electronic marketplace. In B. Spencer, editor, Proceedings of the E-Commerce Applications Workshop, Canadian AI Conference, 2001.]]

[4]

C. Brooks and E. Durfee. Congregating and market formation. In Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents in Multi-Agent Systems, pages 96--103, Bologna, Italy, 2002. ACM Press.]]

Digital Library

[5]

C. Brooks, E. Durfee, and A. Armstrong. An introduction to congregating in multiagent systems. In E. Durfee, editor, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-2000), pages 79--86, 2000.]]

Digital Library

[6]

C. Castelfranchi. Guarantees for autonomy in cognitive agent architecture. In M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, editors, Intelligent Agents: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages (ATAL-94), pages 56--70. Springer-Verlag, 1995.]]

Digital Library

[7]

C. Castelfranchi and R. Falcone. Principles of trust for MAS: Cognitive anatomy, social importance, and quantification. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-98), pages 72--79, Paris, France, 1998.]]

Digital Library

[8]

M. d'Inverno and M. Luck. Understanding Agent Systems. Springer-Verlag, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[9]

D. Gambetta. Can we trust trust? In D. Gambetta, editor, Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, pages 213--237. Basil Blackwell, 1988.]]

[10]

N. Griffiths. Motivated Cooperation in Autonomous Agents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2000.]]

[11]

N. Griffiths and M. Luck. Cooperative plan selection through trust. In F. J. Garijo and M. Boman, editors, Multi-Agent System Engineering: Proceedings of the Ninth European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World (MAAMAW'99). Springer-Verlag, 1999.]]

Digital Library

[12]

N. Griffiths, M. Luck, and M. d'Inverno. Annotating cooperative plans with trusted agents. In R. Falcone and L. Korba, editors, Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Deception, Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies, 2002.]]

[13]

M. Klusch and O. Shehory. Coalition formation among rational information agents. In W. Van de Velde and J. W. Perram, editors, Agents Breaking Away: Proceedings of the Seventh European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World (MAAMAW-96), pages 204--217, 1996.]]

Digital Library

[14]

H. J. Levesque, P. R. Cohen, and J. H. T. Nunes. On acting together. In Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), pages 94--99, Boston, MA, 1990.]]

[15]

M. Luck and M. d'Inverno. A formal framework for agency and autonomy. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, pages 254--260. AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1995.]]

[16]

S. Marsh. Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept. PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 1994.]]

[17]

S. Marsh. Optimism and pessimism in trust. In Proceedings of the Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA '94), 1994.]]

[18]

T. J. Norman. Motivation-based direction of planning attention in agents with goal autonomy. PhD thesis, University of London, 1996.]]

[19]

O. Shehory and S. Kraus. Task allocation via coalition formation among autonomous agents. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95), pages 655--661, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 1995.]]

Digital Library

[20]

M. Tambe. Towards flexible teamwork. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 7:83--124, 1997.]]

Digital Library

[21]

M. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings. Formalizing the cooperative problem solving process. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence (IWDAI-94), pages 403--417, Lake Quinhalt, WA, 1994.]]

Cited By

Roesler EVollmann MManzey DOnnasch L(2024)The dynamics of human–robot trust attitude and behavior — Exploring the effects of anthropomorphism and type of failureComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.108008150(108008)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.108008
Bikakis ACaire P(2020)Contextual and Possibilistic Reasoning for Coalition FormationAI10.3390/ai10300261:3(389-417)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.3390/ai1030026
Hayano MMiyashita YSugawara T(2016)Effective Task Allocation and Stable Cooperative Organization based on Behavioral Strategy SelectionTransactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence10.1527/tjsai.AG-F31:6(AG-F_1-11)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1527/tjsai.AG-F
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Coalition formation through motivation and trust
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence

Recommendations

Fostering Cooperation through Dynamic Coalition Formation and Partner Switching

In this article we tackle the problem of maximizing cooperation among self-interested agents in a resource exchange environment. Our main concern is the design of mechanisms for maximizing cooperation among self-interested agents in a way that their ...
Simulating the Impact of Trust in Coalition Formation: A Preliminary Analysis
BWSS '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Second Brazilian Workshop on Social Simulation

In multiagent systems, agents may cooperate in order to achieve their goals. One possible form of cooperation is through coalition formation. Assuming that agents are selfish, or potentially unreliable, they should implement some mechanism to deal with ...
A coalition formation mechanism for trust and reputation-aware multi-agent systems
SBIA'12: Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Most multi-agent systems engineering methodologies propose the clear definition of roles and organizations. However, in distributed environments where agents with distinct capabilities coexist and cooperate to solve problems, having a rigid organization ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

July 2003

1200 pages

ISBN:1581136838

DOI:10.1145/860575

General Chairs:
Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Israel
,
Michael Wooldridge
UK
,
Program Chairs:
Tuomas Sandholm
USA
,
Makoto Yokoo
Japan

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 July 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

AAMAS03

Sponsor:

AAMAS03: Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

July 14 - 18, 2003

Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

54
Total Citations
View Citations
1,255
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)21
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Roesler EVollmann MManzey DOnnasch L(2024)The dynamics of human–robot trust attitude and behavior — Exploring the effects of anthropomorphism and type of failureComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.108008150(108008)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.108008
Bikakis ACaire P(2020)Contextual and Possibilistic Reasoning for Coalition FormationAI10.3390/ai10300261:3(389-417)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.3390/ai1030026
Hayano MMiyashita YSugawara T(2016)Effective Task Allocation and Stable Cooperative Organization based on Behavioral Strategy SelectionTransactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence10.1527/tjsai.AG-F31:6(AG-F_1-11)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1527/tjsai.AG-F
Abbass HLeu GMerrick K(2016)A Review of Theoretical and Practical Challenges of Trusted Autonomy in Big DataIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2016.25710584(2808-2830)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2571058
Anders GSeebach HSteghöfer JReif WAndré EHähner JMüller-Schloer CUngerer T(2016)The Social Concept of Trust as Enabler for Robustness in Open Self-Organising SystemsTrustworthy Open Self-Organising Systems10.1007/978-3-319-29201-4_1(1-16)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29201-4_1
Granatyr JBotelho VLessing OScalabrin EBarthès JEnembreck F(2015)Trust and Reputation Models for Multiagent SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/281682648:2(1-42)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2816826
Yazdanpanah VDastani M(2015)Quantified degrees of group responsibilityProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XI10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_23(418-436)Online publication date: 4-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_23
Louati AEl Haddad JPinson S(2015)Trust-Based Coalition Formation for Dynamic Service Composition in Social NetworksProceedings, Part I, of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering --- WISE 2015 - Volume 941810.1007/978-3-319-26190-4_38(570-585)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-26190-4_38
Chen J(2014)An Intelligent Transportation Systems Model Based on Multi-Agent TechnologyApplied Mechanics and Materials10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.484-485.1101484-485(1101-1105)Online publication date: Jan-2014
https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.484-485.1101
Nikolaos PIoannis K(2014)A Qualitative Research Approach for the Investigation and Evaluation of Adult Users' Participation Factors through Collaborative E-Learning Activities in the Virtual World of “Second Life”Adult and Continuing Education10.4018/978-1-4666-5780-9.ch003(31-57)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5780-9.ch003
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten