Self-Organizing Agent Coalitions in Distributed Multi-agent Systems

Self-Organization refers to the process through which a system changes its internal organization to adapt to changes in its goals & the environment, without explicit external control. The self-organizing capability seen in many natural and artificial systems is closely congruent to the emergent collective intelligence in distributed multi-agent systems. A group of agents interacting locally may form beneficial coalitions, which are by and large distributed and sometimes self-organizing. The coalition structures often depend on factors like agent types, their motivation to cooperate, the perceived coalition gains and the payoff distribution strategies. This paper presents a short analytical summary of the concept of self-organization, and tries to correlate the key ideas involved in it with our experimental work on agent coalitions in a distributed environment. The agents are heterogeneous and form coalition structures through relatively local interactions without any external central entity governing the process.