Abstract

This article presents J-MADeM, a multi-modal decision making mechanism to provide agents in a Multi-Agent System with a market-based model for complex decision problems. The model is basically based on a set of utility functions, expressing the preferences of the agents for a specific problem, and a one-round sealed-bid combinatorial auction model as the procedure used to choose among different solutions. Thus, coordinated behaviours based on task/object passing can be evaluated to finally obtain acceptable allocations within a synthetic society. J-MADeM is able to simulate different kinds of societies , as well as social attitudes of their members . To evaluate J-MADeM, we analyse two problems: the Gold Miners problem, where a new multi-agent organization is proposed to better adapt to different gold distributions; and a virtual university bar simulation, as an example of complex environment to verify the quality of the social behaviours achieved