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Host selection through collective decision

Published: 04 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In this article, we present a collective decision-making framework inspired by biological swarms and capable of supporting the emergence of a consensus within a population of agents in the absence of environment-mediated communication (stigmergy). Instead, amplification is the result of the variation of a confidence index, stored in individual memory and providing each agent with a statistical estimate of the current popularity of its preferred choice within the whole population. We explore the fundamental properties of our framework using a combination of analytical and numerical methods. We then use Monte Carlo simulation to investigate its applicability to host selection in the presence of multiple alternatives, a problem found in application migration scenarios. The advantages of self-organization and the use of statistically predictive methods in this context are also discussed.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 7, Issue 1
Special section on formal methods in pervasive computing, pervasive adaptation, and self-adaptive systems: Models and algorithms
April 2012
365 pages
ISSN:1556-4665
EISSN:1556-4703
DOI:10.1145/2168260
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 04 May 2012
Accepted: 01 June 2011
Revised: 01 July 2010
Received: 01 October 2009
Published in TAAS Volume 7, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Agent-based systems
  2. collective decision-making

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  • Mark Shackleton and Mike Fisher
  • BI Innovate and Design

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  • (2019)PAC Statistical Model Checking for Markov Decision Processes and Stochastic GamesComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-030-25540-4_29(497-519)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2019
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