Validation and Analysis of a Distributed, Agent-Based Metaheuristic for Negotiation of Consensus Inspired by Honeybee Nest Site Selection Behavior

In this paper, we validate and analyze the ability of an agent-based metaheuristic to facilitate the negotiation of consensus among distributed, networked agents. Our metaheuristic is based on the process honeybees use to achieve consensus in selecting a new nest site. We show that our metaheuristic successfully guides systems to a consensus in a high percentage of cases and that the quorum size parameter controls the trade-off between optimality of choice versus time to consensus and failure rate. Despite agents having communication with only their local neighbors and the absence of centralized data aggregation, coordination, or mediation, our metaheuristic frequently results in the same consensus as that which would be returned by one or more well-known voting algorithms that require global knowledge and centralized tallying to generate a solution; when it does not, the returned consensus is usually an alternative similar in quality to the globally-informed option.