Consensus in distributed soft environments

Reaching consensus in multiagent decision making

“…Moreover someone does not want to be emarginated from the group and asks for modify his own opinion in the direction of the dominant opinion in the group. [Carlsson et al, 1992;Corrao, 2000]. This is related with any description or definition of the behavior of the components in a group whose aim is to reach consensus.…”

“…This is related with any description or definition of the behavior of the components in a group whose aim is to reach consensus. Let us illustrate some reasonable issues that the concept of consensus should meet (see, e. g., Carlsson et al,1992, Eklund et al, 2007. Seeking consensus, especially if utility issues are involved, is the result of a trade-off between agreement and compromise in the behavior of a single decision maker.…”

“…Now we describe a model of collective decision making and the related consensus achievement procedure (see also, e. g. Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007). Let D = {d 1 , d 2 , …, d n } be the set of the decision makers of a committee, A = {a 1 , a 2 , …, a m } the set of alternatives, and C = {c 1 , c 2 , …, c p } the set of the accepted criteria.…”

“…Dynamics of consensus enhancing process is managed by the chairman by introducing in R m a metric, e. g. the Euclidean metric, that acts between couples of points of R m associated to decision makers. For instance, (see Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007), we can assume that the distance between the decision makers d r and d s is given by the formula:…”

“…Then the chairman decides that there are not possible move if the players are not willing for any admissible move. A very particular case is the one considered in the papers Carlsson et al, 1992, andEklund et al, 2007, that we call the Bastian procedure. An alternative to the Bastian procedure is to decide that the maximal winning coalition to enlarge is the one with the maximum number of players.…”