BEHAVIOUR ANALYSIS OF SOCIALLY MOTIVATED AGENTS

Abstract

Inclusion of multiple autonomous agents in the complex systems is highly increasing day to day. Multi Agent Sytems(MAS) are systems that involves a number of collabrative elements, known as agents. Agents are computing devices having two important functionalities – autonomous action i.e having the freedom to work independently and second, the capability of interacting with other agents in the system and with the society or environment.The Tragedy of the Commons (TOC) is a social dilemma where rational and self-interested agents utilizing a shared resource of fixed capacity leads to inefficient utilization of resource. In any society, two crucial aspects : individual and social concerns, are responsible to cause ineffective performance of system as well as individual. Since, these two aspect create a dilemmatic situation for an agent such as whether to contribute or exploit (enjoy own profit without caring about the society). Hence, the proper balancing between individual and social concerns is needed to avoid dilemma. In order to solve this problem, we propose a decentralized approach based on the Altruistic behavior of agents, known as Altruistic Decision Making Approach (ADA). In ADA, agents communicate with each other and adjust their load in accordance with current context, i.e., the agents are able to dynamically vary their load to balance the individual and social considerations and also work in resource bounded fashion. To judge the efficacy of the ADA, it is compared with another state of-the-art decentralized approach on different social conditions and is found better than its competitor. Thus, it is observed that the ADA is simple, efficient and powerful decentralized approach to solve the TOC problem.