Influence of group characteristics on agent voting

TL;DR

This paper investigates how group structure and preferential communication channels affect consensus and voting outcomes in multi-agent systems, proposing combined approaches to enhance decision-making performance.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of preferential communication channels in asynchronous voting and explores combining consensus and voting methods for better multi-agent system performance.

Findings

Preferential communication channels significantly influence voting outcomes.

Combining consensus and voting methods improves decision accuracy.

Group structure impacts the effectiveness of communication strategies.

Abstract

A collective of identical agents in a multi-agent system often works together towards the common goal. In situations where no supervisor agents are present to make decisions for the group, these agents must achieve some consensus via negotiations and other types of communications. We have previously shown that the structure of the group and the priority of communication has a high influence on the group decision if consensus theory methods are used. In this paper, we explore the influence of preferential communication channels in asynchronous group communication in situations, where majority vote and dominant value are used. We also show how this relates to consensus approach in such groups and how to use a combination of both approaches to improve performance of real-life multi-agent systems.