Publications
Refereed Conference Papers
Stability of Multi-Agent Systems.
M. Chli, P. De Wilde, J. Goossenaerts, V. Abramov, N. Szirbik, L. Correia, P. Mariano, R. Ribeiro,
in Eugene Santos Jr. and Peter Willett, editors,
Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics,
pages 551-556, Piscataway, NJ, 2003. IEEE.
Abstract
This work attempts to shed light to the fundamental concepts behind the stability of Multi-Agent Systems. We view the system as a discrete time Markov chain with a potentially unknown transitional probability distribution. The system will be considered to be stable when its state has converged to an equilibrium distribution. Faced with the non-trivial task of establishing the convergence to such a distribution, we propose a hypothesis testing approach according to which we test whether the convergence of a particular system metric has occurred. We describe some artificial multi-agent ecosystems that were developed and we present results based on these systems which confirm that this approach qualitatively agrees with our intuition.
Keywords
Agent-based systems, stability, games, decision making, equilibrium distribution.