Detection of undesirable communication patterns in multi-agent systems

Communication design is usually complex in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) because of dynamic emergent behaviours. The lack of proper quantitative measures to assess alternative solutions and guide an iterative development makes this design even harder. The aim of this work is to efficiently find and describe communication patterns that should be avoided in these systems and identify the agents involved in these patterns. For this purpose, this research presents a suite of novel metrics and classification rules that, respectively, measure agents’ communication and classify their results to describe patterns. This work also provides tools for automatically measuring the metrics and applying the classification rules. In order to evaluate this work, the results of applying these metrics and classification rules have been compared with the quality attribute of performance in several MAS. Performance is measured as the time between a user’s request and the MAS response, and partially represents the factor of the quality of service. The experiments gather four agent-oriented communication designs that belong to two different domains: Crisis-management and Cinema ticket selling. The study reveals that the detected communication patterns are related with performance, and that the proposed metrics can arguably guide the design of communications improving the overall performance of systems.