ADAPTIVE COORDINATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS WITH DELAYED COMMUNICATION

A new model for distributed decision making, distributed game automata , focuses on how communication affects the quality of decisions. The g oal is to limit communication between decision makers such that overhe ad costs are reduced but good decisions still result, Learning automat a play repeated games with payoffs quantifying the performance in a di stributed application, Each automaton's view of the global state is pe riodically updated by communication from other automata of their local state (i.e. current strategy probabilities). Because of infrequent co mmunication and transmission delays, received state information may be come stale: an example game illustrates the mutually conflicting decis ions that can result, Simulation and analytic results show there exist s a maximum communication delay before decision quality begins to suff er, however, with sufficient communication, the agents adapt to a coor dinated policy.