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International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems

COIN 2011: Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent System VII pp 1–20Cite as

Multi-agent Coordination through Mutualistic Interactions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7254))

Abstract

In this paper we present an ecologically-inspired approach to agent coordination. Mutualistic networks of interacting species in nature possess characteristics that provide the systems they represent with features of stability, minimised competition, and increased biodiversity. We take inspiration from some of the ecological mechanisms that operate at the interaction level in mutualistic interactions, and which are believed to be responsible for the emergence of these system level patterns, in order to promote this structural organisation in networks of interacting agents, enhancing in this way their cooperative abilities. We demonstrate that given plausible starting conditions, we can expect mutualistic features to appear in self-organising agent systems, and we compare them with natural ones to show how the characteristics displayed by ecologically inspired networks of agents are similar to those found in natural communities. We argue that the presence of these patterns in agent interaction networks confer these systems with properties similar to those found in mutualistic communities found in the real world.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB, Edinburgh, UK

    Miguel Lurgi & David Robertson

Authors
  1. Miguel Lurgi
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  2. David Robertson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, University of Otago, 60 Clyde Street, 9016, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Stephen Cranefield

  2. Department of Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

  3. Dept. Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics Edifici K2M, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Despatx 202e C/ Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Javier Vázquez-Salceda

  4. IIIA-CSIC, Campus UAB, Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain

    Pablo Noriega

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lurgi, M., Robertson, D. (2012). Multi-agent Coordination through Mutualistic Interactions. In: Cranefield, S., van Riemsdijk, M.B., Vázquez-Salceda, J., Noriega, P. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent System VII. COIN 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7254. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35545-5_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35545-5_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35544-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35545-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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