Flexible social laws

Although communication is generally considered to dominate over processing cost in distributed systems, the problem of communication cost in multiagent planning has not been sufficiently addressed. One method for reducing both communication cost and planning time is the use of social laws. Social laws, however, can be too restrictive, limiting soundness. Flexible social laws can enable multiagent systems to reap the benefits of reduced communication cost and planning time (except in the worst case), without limiting soundness (although optimality may be degraded). By analysing the performance, we show that this model can make multiagent planning exponentially more efficient without limiting its applicability. Keywords: multiagent planning, social laws, distributed AI This paper has not already been accepted by and is not currently under review for a journal or another conference. Nor will it be submitted for such during IJCAI's review period. This research was supported in part by ...