Title
Self-organization through bottom-up coalition formation
Abstract
We present a distributed approach to self-organization in a distributed sensor network. The agents in the system use a series of negotiations incrementally to form appropriate coalitions of sensor and processing resources.Since the system is cooperative, we have developed a range of protocols that allow the agents to share meta-level information before they allocate resources. On one extreme the protocols are based on local utility computations, where each agent negotiates based on its local perspective. From there, a continuum of additional protocols exists in which agents base decisions on marginal social utility, the combination of an agent's marginal utility and that of others. We present a formal framework that allows us to quantify how social an agent can be in terms of the set of agents that are considered and how the choice of a certain level affects the decisions made by the agents and the global utility of the organization.Our results show that by implementing social agents, we obtain an organization with a high global utility both when agents negotiate over complex contracts and when they negotiate over simple ones. The main difference between the two cases is mainly the rate of convergence. Our algorithm is incremental, and therefore the organization that evolves can adapt and stabilize as agents enter and leave the system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1145/860575.860715
AAMAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
bottom-up coalition formation,marginal utility,marginal social utility,local perspective,additional protocol,social agent,sensor network,high global utility,local utility computation,global utility,agents base decision,multi agent systems,bottom up,negotiation,utility computing,self organizing systems,self organization,rate of convergence,multi agent system
Emergent organization,Computer science,Top-down and bottom-up design,Self-organization,Knowledge management,Risk analysis (engineering),Multi-agent system,Rate of convergence,Marginal utility,Wireless sensor network,Distributed computing,Negotiation
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-683-8
52
2.93
References 
Authors
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mark Sims1623.96
Claudia V. Goldman272664.56
Victor R. Lesser356181928.77