A Quantitative Framework for Early Prediction of Cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. MAS can be used to solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent to solve. The different characteristics of MAS help in solving highly complex distributed problems. One of the important characteristics of MAS is its cooperative nature. This character helps different agents to interact with each other by exchanging messages. One of the major challenges in MAS is quantifying the cooperation between agents. This paper presents a framework for the quantification of cooperation between agents in MAS. We propose a methodology which helps to quantify the cooperation in the early stages of software development using a UML sequence diagram and a mathematical model. The proposed techniques are illustrated with the help of a case study. The numerical results we got were quite satisfactory.