Multi-Agent system application idea

Question

I need to implement a multi-agent system for an assignment. I have been brainstorming for ideas as to what I should implement, but I did not come up with anything great yet. I do not want it to be a traffic simulation application, but I need something just as useful.

Answer 1

I once saw an application of multiagent systems for studying/simulating fire evacuation plans in large buildings. Imagine a large building with thousands of people; in case of fire, you want these people to follow some rules for evacuating the building. To evaluate the effectiveness of your evacuation plan rules, you may want to simulate various scenarios using a multiagent system. I think it's a useful and interesting application. If you search the Web, you will find papers and works in this area, from which you might get further inspiration.

Answer 2

A few come to mind:

1. Exploration and mapping: send a team of agents out into an environment to explore, then assimilate all of their observations into consistent maps (not an easy task!)
2. Elevator scheduling: how to service call requests during peak capacities considering the number and location of pending requests, car locations, and their capacities (not too far removed from traffic-light scheduling, though)
3. Air traffic control: consider landing priorities (i.e. fuel. number of passengers, emergency conditions,etc.), airplane position and speed, and landing conditions (ie. number of runways, etc). Then develop a set of rules so that each "agent" (i.e. airplane) assumes its place in a landing sequence. Note that this is a harder version of the flocking problem mentioned in another reply.

Answer 3

Not sure what you mean by "useful" but... you can always have a look at swarmbased AI (school of fish, flock of birds etc.) Each agent (boid) is very very simple in this case. Make the individual agents follow each other, stay away from a predator etc.

Answer 4

Its not quite multi-agent but have you considered a variation on ant colony optimisation ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms