language: en

Using MICE to Study Intelligent Dynamic Coordination

Edmund H. Durfee and Thomas A. Montgomery
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

[(313) 936-1563]

durfee@caen.engin.umich.edu

Abstract We describe a flexible experimental testbed, called MICE, for distributed artificial intelligence research. We argue that the adoption of MICE (or some other standard testbed) by the distributed artificial intelligence community can draw together the community and permit a much greater level of exchange of ideas, formalisms, and techniques. MICE allows an experimenter to specify the constraints and characteristics of an environment in which agents are simulated to act and interact, and does not assume any particular implementation of an agent's reasoning architecture. MICE therefore provides a platform for investigating and evaluating alternative reasoning architectures and coordination mechanisms in many different simulated environments. We outline the design of MICE and illustrate its flexibility by describing simulated environments that model the coordination issues in domains such as predators chasing prey, predators attacking each other, agents fighting a fire, and diverse robots that are working together. In addition, we note that MICE's ability to simulate multi-agent environments makes it an ideal platform for studying reasoning in dynamic worlds; we can associate functionality to arbitrary objects in order to trigger changes in the environment. We conclude by discussing the status of MICE and how we are using MICE in our current research.

[0 This research was sponsored, in part, by the University of Michigan under a Rackham Faculty Research Grant, and by a Bell Northern Research Postgraduate Award.]