Social co-ordination among autonomous problem-solving agents

Abstract

Co-ordination is the glue that binds the activities of autonomous problem-solving agents together into a functional whole. Co-ordination mechanisms for distributed problem-solving usually rely on a central coordinator that orchestrates agent behaviour or just replicate a centralised mechanism among many agents. Social co-ordination is a decentralised mechanism, in which the mutual adaptation of the behaviour of autonomous agents emerges from the interrelation of the agents' self-interests. The few existent models of social co-ordination are based either on sociologie or on economic findings. Still, they usually refer to heterogeneous agent societies and are rarely concerned with the co-ordination of problem-solving activities. In this paper we present a formal framework that unifies the sociological and the economic approach to decentralised social co-ordination. We show how this model can be used to determine the outcome of decentralised social co-ordination within distributed problem-solving systems and illustrate this by an example.

This work was partially supported by the Human Capital and Mobility Program (HCM) of the European Union, contract ERBCHBICT941611, and by CDTI through project 01594-PC019 (BIOS)