Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model
SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Adaptive control: stability, convergence, and robustness
Adaptive control: stability, convergence, and robustness
Next century challenges: mobile networking for “Smart Dust”
MobiCom '99 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Communications of the ACM
Self-Organization in Biological Systems
Self-Organization in Biological Systems
Monitoring group behavior in goal-directed agents using co-efficient plan observation
AOSE'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering VII
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There is a growing need for a theory of "local to global" in distributed multi-agent systems. one which is able systematically to describe and analyze a variety of problems. This is the first in a series of two papers that begins to develop such a theory. Here, we analyze one particular multi-agent problem - the "equigrouping problem," in which multiple identical agents organize themselves into groups of equal size. We develop a formal model for describing the system and an notion of equivalence characterizing multi-agent algorithms in terms of the group behaviors induced by the algorithm. Our main result is a characterization of the space of all solutions to the equigrouping problem with respect to this group behavior equivalence. The result allows us to obtain infinitely many substantially different solutions to the Equigrouping problem, and to understand these different solutions in a qualitatively satisfying manner. The second paper in this series indicates how to develop and generalize the modeling method obtained here to other problems.