Improving Performance of Heterogeneous Agents

Agents provide services not only to humans users but also to agents in one or more multiagent systems. When agents are confronted with multiple tasks to perform (or requests to satisfy), the agent can reduce load on itself by attempting to take advantage of commonalities between the tasks that need to be performed. In this paper, we develop a logical theory by which such “heavily loaded” agents can merge commonalities amongst such tasks. In our framework, agents can be built on top of legacy codebases. We propose a logical formalism called invariants using which agent developers may specify known commonalities between tasks – after this, we propose a sound and complete mechanism to derive all possible derived commonalities. An obvious A ^*-based algorithm may be used to merge a set of tasks in a way that minimised expected execution cost. Unfortunately the execution time of this algorithm is prohibitive, even when only 10 tasks need to be merged, thus making it unusable in practice. We develop heuristic algorithms for this problem that take much less time to execute and produce almost as good ways of merging tasks.