SGER: Multi-Agent Diagnostics

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This grant provides funding for tile development of diagnostic tools for multi-agent systems. Specifically, this research will develop methods to evaluate rationality, convergence and op-timality of the social preference or group objective given the preferences, local goals and interaction mechanisms of individual agents. The developed tools will identify conditions under which the rationality, convergence and desired solution quality requirements are not satisfied by the multi-agent system. The methods will be tested in the context of engineering design decision making. The tools will be made available to the research community, via the WWW, to validate existing or planned agent-based applications. If successful, the results of this research will improve the performance and reliability of agent-based solutions for the control arid coordination of complex systems. The primary goal of this research is to develop methods for answering fundamental questions about the validity and quality of decisions made by distributed decision-makers. Identifying conditions under which multi-agent systems produce acceptable results will help to determine appropriate application areas for agent-based solutions.