Modification of Contract Net Protocol(CNP) : A Rule-Updation Approach

Abstract: Coordination in multi-agent system is very essential, in order to perform complex tasks and lead MAS towards its goal. Also, the member agents of multi-agent system should be autonomous as well as collaborative to accomplish the complex task for which multi-agent system is designed specifically. Contract-Net Protocol (CNP) is one of the coordination mechanisms which is used by multi-agent systems which prefer coordination through interaction protocols. In order to overcome the limitations of conventional CNP, this paper proposes a modification in conventional CNP called updated-CNP. Updated-CNP is an effort towards updating of a CNP in terms of its limitations of modifiability and communication overhead. The limitation of the modification of tasks, if the task requirements change at any instance, corresponding to tasks which are allocated to contractor agents by manager agents is possible in our updated-CNP version, which was not possible in the case of conventional-CNP, as it has to be restarted in the case of task modification. This in turn will be reducing the communication overhead of CNP, which is time taken by various agents using CNP to pass messages to each other. For the illustration of the updated CNP, we have used a sound predator-prey case study.