An Experimental Study of the Emergent Behaviors of Self-organizing Agent Communities

Abstract—Emergent behavior is an essential feature in multi-agent systems and plays a significant role in the applica-tions of agent technology. Because of the huge gap between individual agents ’ behaviors and those of the whole system, specifying and reasoning about emergent behaviors are noto-riously difficult. Simulation has been the essential method to study emergent behaviors in multi-agent systems. In this paper, we report an experimental study of the emergent behaviors of self-organized agent communities, in which emergent behaviors play a crucial role. The experiments confirmed the results of a theoretical analysis of agent communities using a formal theory called Scenario Calculus. It further provided insight into the dynamic features of the system that were very difficult to ob-tain by using formal logic, such as the speed of convergence to the emergent states and the relationships between the conver-gence time and various parameters of self-organized agent communities systems