Authors: E. Billard and J. Pasquale.
Title: Adaptive coordination in distributed systems with delayed communication.
Published in: IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., 1994.

Abstract: A new model for distributed decision
making, distributed game automata, focuses on how communication affects the
quality of decisions. The goal is to limit communication between decision
makers such that overhead costs are reduced but good decisions still result.
Learning automata play repeated games with payoffs quantifying the
performance in a distributed application. Each automaton's view of the global
state is periodically updated by communication from other automata of their
local state (i.e. current strategy probabilities). Because of infrequent
communication and transmission delays, received state information may become
stale: an example game illustrates the mutually conflicting decisions that
can result. Simulation and analytic results show that there exists a maximum
communication delay before decision quality begins to suffer, however, with
sufficient communication, the agents adapt to a coordinated policy.