Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system may be regarded as a group of ideal, rational, real-time agents interacting with one another to collectively achieve their goals. To achieve their goals, each one of these individual agents needs to be equipped to reason not only about the environment, but also about the behavior of other agents. Based on this reasoning, agents need to generate a sequence of actions and execute them. In a heterogeneous environment like soccer, each agent needs to have a strategy to solve a particular problem. In this context, a strategy refers to a decision-making mechanism that provides a long term consideration for selecting actions to achieve specific goals. Each strategy differs in the way it tackles the solution space of the problem. The presence of multiple agents necessitates the need for a different treatment. We need a coordination mechanism that handles the interaction between the agents. This mechanism is responsible for the implementation of the agents' actions and also the planning process that goes into the implementation. Traditionally, depending on their approach to solving a problem of this nature, agents have been divided into three main categories [11]

• Deliberative
• Reactive
• Hybrid