Computing coalitions in Multiagent Systems: A contextual reasoning approach

In multiagent systems, agents often have to rely on other agents to reach their goals, for example when they lack a needed resource or do not have the capability to perform a required action. Agents there- fore need to cooperate. Some of the questions then raised, such as, which agent to cooperate with, are addressed in the field of coalition formation. In this paper we go further and first, address the question of how to com- pute the solution space for the formation of coalitions using a contextual reasoning approach. We model agents as contexts in Multi-Context Sys- tems (MCS) and dependence relations among agents as bridge rules. We then systematically compute all potential coalitions using algorithms for MCS equilibria. Finally, given a set of functional and non-functional requirements, we propose ways to select the best solutions. We illustrate our approach with an example from robotics.