An experimental study of the emergent behaviors of self-organized agent communities

Emergent behavior is an essential feature in multi-agent systems and plays a significant role in the applications of agent technology. Because of the huge gap between individual agents´ behaviors and those of the whole system, specifying and reasoning about emergent behaviors are notoriously difficult. Simulation has been the essential method to study emergent behaviors in multi-agent systems. In this paper, we report an experimental study of the emergent behaviors of self-organized agent communities, in which emergent behaviors play a crucial role. The experiments confirmed the results of a theoretical analysis of agent communities using a formal theory called scenario calculus. It further provided insight into the dynamic features of the system that were very difficult to obtain by using formal logic, such as the speed of convergence to the emergent states and the relationships between the convergence time and various parameters of self-organized agent communities systems.