Efficient opinion sharing in large decentralised teams
OA Location
Author(s)
Pryymak, O
Rogers, A
Jennings, N
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
In this paper we present an approach for improving the accuracy of shared opinions in a large decentralised team. Specifically, our solution optimises the opinion sharing process in order to help the majority of agents to form the correct opinion about a state of a common subject of interest, given only few agents with noisy sensors in the large team. We build on existing research that has examined models of this opinion sharing problem and shown the existence of optimal parameters where incorrect opinions are filtered out during the sharing process. In order to exploit this collective behaviour in complex networks, we present a new decentralised algorithm that allows each agent to gradually regulate the importance of its neighbours’ opinions (their social influence). This leads the system to the optimised state in which agents are most likely to filter incorrect opinions, and form a correct opinion regarding the subject of interest. Crucially, our algorithm is the first that does not introduce additional communication over the opinion sharing itself. Using it 80-90% of the agents form the correct opinion, in contrast to 60-75% with the existing message-passing algorithm DACOR proposed for this setting. Moreover, our solution is adaptive to the network topology and scales to thousands of agents. Finally, the use of our algorithm allows agents to significantly improve their accuracy even when deployed by only half of the team.
Date Issued
2012-06-04
Date Acceptance
2012-06-04
Citation
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '12), 2012, pp.543-550
ISBN
978-0-9817381-1-6
Publisher
International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
Start Page
543
End Page
550
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '12)
Copyright Statement
© 2012 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/273087/
Source
11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '12)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2012-06-04
Finish Date
2012-06-08
Coverage Spatial
Valencia, Spain