In past decades, significant attention has been devoted to the task allocation and load balancing in distributed systems. Although there have been some related surveys about this subject, each of which only made a very preliminary review on the state of art of one single type of distributed systems. To correlate the studies in varying types of distributed systems and make a comprehensive taxonomy on them, this survey mainly categorizes and reviews the representative studies on task allocation and load balancing according to the general characteristics of varying distributed systems. First, this survey summarizes the general characteristics of distributed systems. Based on these general characteristics, this survey reviews the studies on task allocation and load balancing with respect to the following aspects: 1) typical control models; 2) typical resource optimization methods; 3) typical methods for achieving reliability; 4) typical coordination mechanisms among heterogeneous nodes; and 5) typical models considering network structures. For each aspect, we summarize the existing studies and discuss the future research directions. Through the survey, the related studies in this area can be well understood based on how they can satisfy the general characteristics of distributed systems.
Social networks have recently been widely explored in many fields; these networks are composed of a set of autonomous social actors and the interaction relations among them. Multiagent computing has already been widely envisioned to be a powerful paradigm for modeling autonomous multientity systems; therefore, it is promising to connect the research on social networks and multiagent systems. In general, there are three views for research on social networks: the structure-oriented view, in which only the network structure characteristics among actors are considered, the actor-oriented view, in which only the behavior characteristics of actors are considered, and the actor-structure crossing view, in which both actors and network structures are considered and their crossing effects are explored. This survey paper mainly concerns studies on social networks that have the last two views and discusses the relationship between social networks and multiagent systems. Because coordination is critical for both multiagent systems and social networks, this paper classifies studies on social networks that are based on the coordination mechanisms among the actors in the social networks. By referring to typical types of coordination situations in multiagent systems, social networks in previous studies can be classified into three classes: cooperative social networks, noncooperative social networks, and multiple social networks; for each class, this paper reviews the existing studies and discusses the challenge issues and possible future research directions. From this survey, we find that social networks can be understood well via a multiagent coordination perspective and also that many multiagent coordination techniques can be cogently applied in research on social networks. Moreover, this paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the multiagent coordination perspective by comparing with other perspectives on studying social networks.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.