Evaluating the Effectiveness of Multi-Agent Organisational Paradigms in a Real-Time Strategy Environment: Engineering Multiagent Systems Track

We study the impact of using different organisational paradigms on the design and implementation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) for Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games. We examine systems designed and implemented according to a specific paradigm on their performance in a practical scenario, as well as examining software-engineering concepts like size and complexity entailed by the according implementations. In contrast to related theoretical work, we deal with the practical constraints and implications of the paradigms by targeting the prototypical RTS game StarCraft: Brood War. Through careful analysis of this environment, agent systems for four separate paradigms that operate at different levels of autonomy and communication are designed, implemented, and evaluated by thousands of instrumented runs. One of the main findings is that using a central processing agent, e.g. in a market-based approach, increases task performance, but at the cost of increased code complexity.