Social Foraging Theory for Robust Multiagent System Design

An analogy between an agent (e.g., an autonomous vehicle) and a biological forager is extended to a social environment by viewing a communication network as implementing interagent sociality. We first describe engineering design within an evolutionary game-theoretic framework. We then explain why sociality may emerge in some environments and for some agent objectives. Next, we derive the evolutionarily stable design strategy for an agent manufacturer: 1) choosing whether the agent it produces should cooperate with other agents in a search problem and 2) choosing the group size of a multiagent system tasked with a cooperative search problem. We show the impact of "agent relatedness," a measure of common descent between two agents based on their underlying manufacturers, on the choices in scenarios 1) and 2). Our predictions are evaluated in an autonomous vehicle simulation testbed. The results illustrate a new methodology for manufacturers to make robust, optimal choices for multiagent system design for a given set of objectives and domain of operation. Note to Practitioners-The design of autonomous multirobot systems with various applications, such as in parts production or search and destroy operations in a military environment, is of growing importance. Here, we integrate economic and technical issues into an unified engineering design framework for the manufacturers of robots. Our approach leads to manufacturer design decisions that are robust relative to the market for a manufacturer's products. Robot component aspects, such as sensors and communications as well as mission performance aspects, can be captured and coupled into the design process. We use the design of intervehicle cooperation and robot group size to illustrate this approach. The practical significance lies in the fact that we take a broad perspective on engineering design, one closer to the real world, due to the considerations of marketplace economics. Moreover, the approach provides a framework to study design choices that escape systematic analysis in other frameworks (e.g., group size)