Authors: E. Billard and J. Pasquale.
Title: Effects of delayed communication in dynamic group formation.
Published in: IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., 23(5):1265-1275, 1993.

Abstract: We investigate how delayed
communication affects the dynamic formation of groups in distributed systems,
where all decision-making agents join the same group because each expects to
improve its own performance. For example, distributed job schedulers may form
a group to utilize the idle resources of other members within the group.
Forming a group is a search problem and we examine agents which use the
feedback mechanism of stochastic learning automata to carry out this search.
Although a group formation may have the potential for synergy, the agents
must successfully coordinate their actions within the group relevant to the
application. For example, job schedulers who form a group must still balance
the load among the shared resources; that is, the collective actions of the
schedulers need to be coordinated and greedy schedulers who all pick the same
processor may not be successful. Agents may find that working alone is more
desirable since their actions need not be coordinated and the results of
their own actions are more predictable. An additional challenge to the search
problem is to cope with the delay in communication between the agents. The
purpose of this study is to model systems where agents adaptively search for
compatible co-workers, under the constraint of delayed communication. With
insufficient communication, the agents decide to work alone (and receive a
modest benefit) but, with sufficient communication, the agents make the more
advantageous decision to work together.