Strategies for Distributed Decisionmaking

Several mechanisms which can be used in the real-time distributed coordination of large-scale dynamical systems which display a subsystem structure are derived. A spectrum of approaches using varying degrees of types of communication to reduce the uncertainty of each agent concerning the events controlled by others is presented. The organizational requirements of each coordination strategy in terms of constraints on the interagent relationships are derived, and it is shown that while any of the mechanisms discussed here work well in hierarchical organizational structures, many are adaptable to much larger classes of structures.