Properties of a Formal Method for Prediction of Emergent Behaviors in Swarm-Based Systems
SEFM '04 Proceedings of the Software Engineering and Formal Methods, Second International Conference
Analysis of Dynamic Task Allocation in Multi-Robot Systems
International Journal of Robotics Research
The I-SWARM project: intelligent small world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation
SAB'04 Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Swarm Robotics
Multi-agent role allocation: issues, approaches, and multiple perspectives
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
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The goal of this paper is to explore the effects of synchronization on distributed decision making processes. In particular, we examine the dynamics of a spatially distributed multiagent system where agents use local information to make role assignments. By investigating several role assignment procedures for this problem, we find that, in general, system stability increases as the number of agents that make a decision at any particular time decreases. This result is promising, because in a physical, distributed system the time at which agents make their decisions would most likely not be synchronized. Although the two decision making procedures examined in this paper are similar, their dynamics with respect to synchronization are very different. One shows a linear relationship between synchronization and system behavior, whereas a non-linear relationship is seen with the second method. We demonstrate the significance of synchroneity on the dynamics of these complex systems and argue that it should be taken into account when studying the behaviors of multi-agent systems that utilize emergent coordination.