Be Patient and Tolerate Imprecision: How Autonomous Agents Can Coordinate Effectively

Abstract

A decentralized multiagent system comprises agents who act autonomously based on local knowledge. Achieving coordination in such a system is nontrivial, but is essential in most applications, where disjointed or incoherent behavior would be undesirable. Coordination in decentralized systems is a richer phenomenon than previously believed. In particular, five major attributes are crucial: the extent of the local knowledge and choices of the member agents, the extent of their shared knowledge, the level of their inertia, and the level of precision of the required coordination. Interestingly, precision and inertia turn out to control the coordination process. They define different regions within each of which the other attributes relate nicely with coordination, but among which their relationships are altered or even reversed. Based on our study, we propose simple design rules to obtain coordinated behavior in decentralized multiagent systems.