Evolved Gossip Contracts - A Framework for Designing Multi-agent Systems

Multi-agent systems are systems of autonomous interacting agents acting in an environment to achieve a common goal. One of the most interesting aspects of multi-agent systems is when they exhibit emergence; where the whole is considered greater than the sum of the parts. Designing multi-agents systems is challenging, and doing this in an automated way has been described as “one of the holy grails of artificial intelligence and agent-based modelling”. In previous research, we presented a novel decentralised cooperation protocol called Gossip Contracts (GC), which is inspired by Contract Net and Gossip Protocol. Here we present Evolved Gossip Contracts (EGC), a new framework which builds on GC and uses evolutionary computing to tailor GC to address a specific problem. We evaluate the EGC framework and the experimental results indicate that it is a promising approach for the automated design of decentralised strategies.