Organisation dynamique d'équipes d'engins autonomes par écoute flottante
François Legras · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2003
Within the field of multi-agent systems (MASs), communication is often viewed as an abstract and dyadic process. In this thesis, we argue that MASs can profit from overhearing, a form of communication found in human activity that can be used to give robustness and flexibility to their structure. To this end, we propose the star model, which allows a MAS to use overhearing to dynamically adopt a structure based on leader-centered groups, following the evolution of limited and dynamic communication possibilities. This model provides a framework for the agents' activities that imposes constraints on the agents' decision processes (most notably coherence), but allows them to use every message that they receive (even if they are not the intended recipients) to update their representations of the MAS organization, and thereby facilitating the overall activity of the MAS. On the one hand, we develop several elements in order to exploit this model (a language with associated semantics, an update mechanism and an algorithm). On the other hand, two series of experiments (OTTO and LOTTO) allow us to study the effects of the variation of several parameters on the behavior of the model.