A Robust Decision-Making Framework Based on Collaborative Agents

Abstract

Making decisions under uncertainty is very challenging but necessary as most real-world scenarios are plagued by disturbances that can be generated internally, by the hardware itself, or externally, by the environment. Hence, we propose a general decision-making framework which can be adapted to optimally address the most heterogeneous real-world domains without being significantly affected by undesired disturbances. Our paper presents a multi-agent based structure in which agents are capable of individual decision-making but also interact to perform subsequent, and more robust, collaborative decision-making processes. The complexity of each software agent can be kept quite low without a deterioration of the performance since an intelligent and robust-to-uncertainty decision-making behaviour arises when their locally produced measure of support are shared and exploited collaboratively. We show that by equipping agents with classic computational intelligence techniques, to extract features and generate measure of supports, complex hybrid multi-agent software structures capable of handling uncertainty can be easily designed. The resulting multi-agent systems generated with this approach are based on a two-phases decision-making methodology which first runs parallel local decision making processes to then aggregate the corresponding outputs to improve upon the accuracy of the system. To highlight the potential of this approach, we provided multiple implementations of the general framework and compared them over four different application scenarios. Results are promising and show that having a second collaborative decision-making process is always beneficial.

Keywords

• Collaborative systems
• decision-making
• distributed systems
• intelligent decision-making
• fuzzy systems
• multi-agent systems