Host: Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics
Co-host: International Fuzzy Systems Association, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Japan Chapter
In multi-agent systems, communication among agents plays an important role for cooperative behavior. In this paper, we investigate the effect of direct communication in a multi-agent system, Ant System (AS). Ant agents in AS usually perform indirect communication through pheromones. We introduce the mechanism that ants communicate directly with neighboring ants so that each ant's information can be exchanged. As experimental results, the AS with direct communication acquired better solutions than conventional AS. If the ants have excessive range of direct communications, however, the search performance becomes worse. We showed that local communications are effective in order to search solutions while striking a balance between centralization and diversification of the ants' action. For the effective search, it is important to set the range of the direct communication appropriately.
