Cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems Using Learning Automata

Agents are software entities that act continuously and autonomously in a special environment. It is very essential for the agents to have the ability to learn how to act in the special environment for which they are designed to act in, to show reflexes to their environment actions, to choose their way and pursue it autonomously, and to be able to adapt and learn. In multi-agent systems, many intelligent agents that can interact with each other, cooperate to achieve a set of goals. Because of the inherent complexity that exists in dynamic and changeable multi-agent environments, there is always a need to machine learning in such environments. As a model for learning, learning automata act in a stochastic environment and are able to update their action probabilities considering the inputs from their environment, so optimizing their functionality as a result. Learning automata are abstract models that can perform some numbers of actions. Each selected action is evaluated by a stochastic environment and a response is given back to the automata. Learning automata use this response to choose its next action. In this paper, the goal is to investigate and evaluate the application of learning automata to cooperation in multi-agent systems, using soccer server simulation as a test-bed. Because of the large state space of a complex multi-agent domains, it is vital to have a method for environmental states’ generalization. An appropriate selection of such a method can have a great role in determining agent states and actions. In this paper we have also introduced and designed a new technique called “The best corner in state square” for generalizing the vast number of states in the environment to a few number of states by building a virtual grid in agent’s domain environment. The efficiency of this technique in a cooperative multi-agent domain is investigated.