Title: On emergent complex behaviour, self-organised criticality and phase transitions in multi-agent systems: autonomy oriented computing (AOC) perspectives

Authors: Jiming Liu, Bingcheng Hu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR. ' Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR

Abstract: In a Multi-Agent System (MAS), there usually exist system-level goals that agents are collectively trying to attain. Generally speaking, the local behaviours and performances of individual agents directly determine which global characteristics of an MAS, for example, the global performance and/or patterns, will emerge and how the system-level goals will be attained. In most cases, such a local–global relationship is neither obvious nor straightforward. In this paper, we will address several issues on modelling emergent complex behaviours in MAS. In particular, we will focus on the local–global relationship in a Self-Organising MAS (SOMAS), and discuss the phenomena of Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) and phase transition in SOMAS.

Keywords: autonomy-oriented computing; self-organisation; multi-agent systems; MAS; emergent behaviours; complex behaviour; self-organised criticality; phase transition; RoboNBA; agent-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2008.018182

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2008 Vol.3 No.1, pp.3 - 16

Published online: 10 May 2008 *

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