Abstract
This paper examines the decentralized formation of groups within a peer-to-peer multi-agent system. More specifically, it frames group formation as a clustering problem, and examines how to determine cluster characteristics such as area and density in the absence of information about the entire data set, such as the number of points, the number of clusters, or the maximum distance between points, that are available to centralized clustering algorithms. We develop a method in which agents individually search for other agents with similar characteristics in a peer-to-peer manner. These agents group into small centrally controlled clusters which learn cluster parameters by examining and improving their internal composition over time. We show through simulation that this method allows us to find clusters of a wide variety of sizes without adjusting agent parameters.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ogston, E., Overeinder, B., van Steen, M., Brazier, F. (2004). Group Formation Among Peer-to-Peer Agents: Learning Group Characteristics. In: Moro, G., Sartori, C., Singh, M.P. (eds) Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing. AP2PC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2872. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25840-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25840-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-24053-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-25840-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)