An Extended the Contract Net Protocol Based on the Personal Assistant

This paper is aimed at the extended the contract net protocol (CNP) based on the personal assistant for reducing the cost of communication. The CNP is a powerful coordination mechanism in multi-agent systems. However, the performance of the CNP degrades when the number of agents increases or the announcement is of high frequency. Hence, it has a problem of applicability to large-scale multi-agent systems. In order to overcome this problem, a personal assistant that may evaluate the other agents is proposed. It can avoid an announcement sent to redundant bidders, and only the best bidder sends the bid proposal. Experimental results demonstrate that the extended CNP based on the personal assistant can reduce the cost of communication evidently.