Homeotaxis: Coordination with Persistent Time-Loops

Abstract

Abstract. We present a novel approach to self-organisation of coordinated behaviour among multiple resource-sharing agents. We consider a hierarchical multi-agent system comprising multiple energy-dependent agents split into local neighbourhoods, each with a dedicated controller, and a centralised coordinator dealing only with the controllers. The coordinated behaviour is required in order to achieve a balance between the overall resource consumption by the multi-agent collective and the stress on the community. Minimising the resource consumption increases the stress, while reducing the stress may lead to unrestricted and highly unpredictable demand, harming the individual agents in the long-run. We identify underlying forces in the system's dynamics, suggest a number of quantitative measures used to contrast different strategies, and introduce a novel strategy based on persistent sensorimotor time-loops: homeotaxis. Homeotaxis subsumes the homeokinetic principle, extending it both in terms of scope (multi-agent selforganisation) and the state-space, and allows to select the best adaptive strategy for the considered system.

Adaptive Control of Distributed Energy Management: A Comparative Study

“…Homeotaxis is a domain-invariant bio-inspired method for control of multi-agent systems, that minimises the persistent time-loop error [13]. Homeotaxis extends the principle of homeokinesis developed by Der et al [3,4] as a general domain-invariant control mechanism for self-organised behaviour in automated systems.…”

“…For a full derivation of equations, please refer to [13]. We estimate the perturbation or error in the system ξ t , using the following approximations:…”