An Analysis of the Effect of Communication for Multi-agent Planning in a Grid World Domain

Agent-based technology has generated a lot of attention in recent years because of its promise as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing software systems. Some problems in real world cannot be handled by a single agent. Multiple agents work together to accomplish some task. Although multi-agent systems (MASs) provide many potential advantages, they also present many difficult challenges. This paper illustrates the importance of communication for planning in a multi-agent setting by considering a grid world domain that consists of obstacles at different locations. This paper provides a theoretical framework that is validated by the experimental results. Performance analysis with respect to plan size and execution time is also reported.