Comparative evaluation of cooperative plan execution strategies in multiagent environments

Coordinating the action of distributed agents in a dynamically changing environment is a difficult task. The difficulty stems from the fact the real-world environment changes independently from the actions of the agents. Furthermore, the agents may have limited competence and awareness about one another´s decisions and about the environment. This paper focuses on cooperative plan execution and presents a dynamic threshold-based scheme for balancing load among distributed agents. Different load balancing strategies, namely client-initiated, server-initiated, and hybrid, are discussed, and a comparative analysis of these strategies is presented. The study shows that dynamic threshold-based strategies perform well compared to static threshold-based methods. The study also shows that dynamic threshold-based strategies greatly reduce the communication overhead, and are well suited for cooperative plan execution in dynamic environments