The statistical mechanics of belief sharing in multi-agent systems

Abstract

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Self-organization in an agent network: A mechanism and a potential application

“…Self-organization mechanisms focusing on network structural adaptation (namely adapting relations among agents), which are used to improve team formation or task allocation, have also been researched [1,9,10,12,27].Gaston and desJardins [9] developed two network structural adaptation strategies for dynamic team formation. Their first strategy was a structure-based approach, where an agent prefers to select another agent to form a connection, which has more neighbors.…”

“…The two strategies are suitable in different situations. Glinton et al [10] empirically analyzed the drawback of the structure-based strategy proposed in [9], and then designed a new network adaptation strategy, which limits the maximum number of links an agent can have. Abdallah and Lesser [1] did further research in self-organization of agent networks and creatively used reinforcement learning to adapt the network structure.…”

“…Griffiths and Luck's mechanism is very suitable in some special dynamic environments where trust or reputation among agents is difficult to build up. However, these network structural adaptation methods, proposed in [1,9,10,12], assumed that only one type of relation exists in the network and the number of neighbors possessed by an agent has no effect on its local load. These assumptions are impractical in some cases where multiple relations exist among agents in a network and agents have to expend resources to manage their relations with other agents.…”