Related papers: Cooperation in Small Groups -- an Optimal Transpor…
Flocking is a coordinated collective behavior that results from local sensing between individual agents that have a tendency to orient towards each other. Flocking is common among animal groups and might also be useful in robotic swarms. In…
Problem solving (e.g., drug design, traffic engineering, software development) by task forces represents a substantial portion of the economy of developed countries. Here we use an agent-based model of cooperative problem solving systems to…
Coalition formation is a key problem in automated negotiation among self-interested agents, and other multiagent applications. A coalition of agents can sometimes accomplish things that the individual agents cannot, or can do things more…
We consider an optimal partition of resources (e.g. consumers) between several agents (e.g. experts), given utility functions ("wisdoms") for the agents and their capacities. This problem is a variant of optimal transport…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
The problem of near-optimal distributed path planning to locally sensed targets is investigated in the context of large swarms. The proposed algorithm uses only information that can be locally queried, and rigorous theoretical results on…
In a recent paper, we analyzed the self-assembly of a complex cooperation network. The network was shown to approach a state where every agent invests the same amount of resources. Nevertheless, highly-connected agents arise that extract…
Populations of mobile and communicating agents describe a vast array of technological and natural systems, ranging from sensor networks to animal groups. Here, we investigate how a group-level agreement may emerge in the continuously…
An economy, large or small, has traditionally been defined in terms of an explicit set of agents and an assignment of characteristics to each agent. But when individual agents are negligible, most economically relevant properties of an…
Cooperative communication plays a central role in theories of human cognition, language, development, culture, and human-robot interaction. Prior models of cooperative communication are algorithmic in nature and do not shed light on why…
We introduce and study a model of an interacting population of agents who collaborate in groups which compete for limited resources. Groups are formed by random matching agents and their worth is determined by the sum of the efforts…
We study an extensive class of movement minimization problems which arise from many practical scenarios but so far have little theoretical study. In general, these problems involve planning the coordinated motion of a collection of agents…
We investigate the emergence of self-organised trails between two specific target areas in collective motion of social organisms by means of an agent-based model. We present numerical evidences that an increase in the efficiency of…
By introducing a predictive mechanism with small-world connections, we propose a new motion protocol for self-driven flocks. The small-world connections are implemented by randomly adding long-range interactions from the leader to a few…
This paper presents coordination algorithms for groups of mobile agents performing deployment and coverage tasks. As an important modeling constraint, we assume that each mobile agent has a limited sensing/communication radius. Based on the…
We introduce the concept of continuous transportation task to the context of multi-agent systems. A continuous transportation task is one in which a multi-agent team visits a number of fixed locations, picks up objects, and delivers them to…
Robots sometimes have to work together with a mixture of partially-aligned or conflicting goals. Flocking - coordinated motion through cohesion, alignment, and separation - traditionally assumes uniform desired inter-agent distances. Many…
In this paper, we consider the coordination control of a group of autonomous mobile agents with multiple leaders. Different interconnection topologies are investigated. At first, a necessary and sufficient condition is proved in the case of…
Flocking behavior has attracted considerable attention in multi-agent systems. The structure of flocking has been predominantly studied through the application of artificial potential fields coupled with velocity consensus. These…
In multi-agent systems, should limited resources be concentrated into a few capable agents or distributed among many simpler ones? This work formulates the split over $n$ resource sharing problem where a group of $n$ agents equally shares a…