Abstract
An evolutionary Multi-Agent System is discussed as an autonomous decentralized system in which each agent is capable of adapting to its embodied environment by means of artificial evolution. This type of system is a promising approach to adaptive system design, although it is undoubtedly difficult to analyze what they are doing or how they interact with each other to achieve a given task. Moreover, it is also difficult to understand how they evolved their function. In this paper, the ecological method is experimentally applied to a multi-agent system to analyze the system dynamics. A food collecting problem is selected to illustrate how to use the ecological method to grasp characteristics of agents in a Multi-Agent System. After the consideration of the analytical results, we succeeded in improving the performance of the system. This proves that the ecological method for natural systems can effectively be applied to multi-agent systems.
