Foraging in a Grid World Using Action Templates

Abstract

The emergence of behavioural and structural congruence based on simple local interactions of atomic units is a fascination to the scientific community across many disciplines. The climax of behavioural congruence and emergence of behaviour is exemplified by the community life-style of ants. Each individual ant possesses the capability only to solve part of the overall puzzle while aggressively communicating in primitive methods with the spatially related neighbours to produce emergent behaviour.
The primary hypothesis of this research is that the constituent atomic actions of a complex behaviour could be successfully coordinated by a collection of collaborative and autonomous agents with the use of Action Templates.
The AAANTS (Adaptive Autonomous Agent colony interactions with Network Transparent Services) model was conceptualised and implemented as a platform to represent the biologically inspired coordination and learning model to test the research hypothesis. The domain of foraging in a grid-world was identified as the experimental basis to evaluate the AAANTS coordination model. The experiments demonstrated relative improvements in achieving behavioural congruence using the AAANTS model in relation to the traditional Monte-Carlo based methods.