Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, we study distributed algorithms for cooperative agents that allow them to exchange their assigned tasks in order to reduce their team cost. We define a new type of contract, called K-swaps, that describes multiple task exchanges among multiple agents at a time, which generalizes the concept of single task exchanges. We design a distributed algorithm that constructs all possible K-swaps that reduce the team cost of a given task allocation and show that each agent typically only needs to communicate a small part of its local computation results to the other agents. We then demonstrate empirically that K-swaps can reduce the team costs of several existing task-allocation algorithms significantly even if K is small.

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