Multiequilibria Analysis for a Class of Collective Decision-Making Networked Systems

Fontan, Angela; Altafini, Claudio

doi:10.1109/tcns.2017.2774014

Cited by 21 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Larger values of u might lead to secondary bifurcations, which reflects the local nature of Theorem 1, at least for generic strongly connected graphs. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the appearance of secondary bifurcations under symmetric interconnection topologies are provided in [22].…”

Section: A Pitchfork Bifurcation By Design In Generic Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiagent Decision-Making Dynamics Inspired by Honeybees

Gray

Franci

Srivastava

et al. 2018

IEEE Trans. Control Netw. Syst.

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Abstract-When choosing between candidate nest sites, a honeybee swarm reliably chooses the most valuable site and even when faced with the choice between near-equal value sites, it makes highly efficient decisions. Value-sensitive decision-making is enabled by a distributed social effort among the honeybees, and it leads to decision-making dynamics of the swarm that are remarkably robust to perturbation and adaptive to change. To explore and generalize these features to other networks, we design distributed multi-agent network dynamics that exhibit a pitchfork bifurcation, ubiquitous in biological models of decisionmaking. Using tools of nonlinear dynamics we show how the designed agent-based dynamics recover the high performing value-sensitive decision-making of the honeybees and rigorously connect investigation of mechanisms of animal group decisionmaking to systematic, bio-inspired control of multi-agent network systems. We further present a distributed adaptive bifurcation control law and prove how it enhances the network decisionmaking performance beyond that observed in swarms.

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Section: A Pitchfork Bifurcation By Design In Generic Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiagent Decision-Making Dynamics Inspired by Honeybees

Gray

Franci

Srivastava

et al. 2018

IEEE Trans. Control Netw. Syst.

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“…The correlation between frustration and duration of the government negotiations can be explained also at a deeper level, using dynamical models of collective decision-making in multiagent systems [28][29][30] . Such models represent a decision as the trespassing of a bifurcation threshold, and the corresponding bifurcation parameter has the interpretation of "social commitment" of the agents, i.e., intensity of the interactions among the agents.…”

Section: Openmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The high correlation between frustration and government negotiation days admits an interpretation in terms of dynamical models of collective decision-making, see "Methods" and "Supplementary Information". These models, used for instance in 30,31 , are inspired by the behavior of animal groups 28,29,35 and in our case associate a state variable to each MP, variable that represents the decision in a confidence vote. In order for a government to win a confidence vote, an attractor corresponding to a majority of positive decisions must be present.…”

Section: Prediction Of the Successful Cabinet Coalition The Notion Omentioning

confidence: 99%

A signed network perspective on the government formation process in parliamentary democracies

Fontan

Altafini

2021

Sci Rep

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In parliamentary democracies, government negotiations talks following a general election can sometimes be a long and laborious process. In order to explain this phenomenon, in this paper we use structural balance theory to represent a multiparty parliament as a signed network, with edge signs representing alliances and rivalries among parties. We show that the notion of frustration, which quantifies the amount of “disorder” encoded in the signed graph, correlates very well with the duration of the government negotiation talks. For the 29 European countries considered in this study, the average correlation between frustration and government negotiation talks ranges between 0.42 and 0.69, depending on what information is included in the edges of the signed network. Dynamical models of collective decision-making over signed networks with varying frustration are proposed to explain this correlation.

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“…To model the evolution of the opinions of the agents in a community represented as a signed social network we use the model of opinion forming previously introduced in [1], [17], [18]. This model is characterized by sigmoidal and saturated nonlinearities, describing how the agents transmit their opinion to their neighbors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Frustration in Collective Decision-Making Dynamical Processes on Multiagent Signed Networks

Fontan

Altafini

2022

IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr.

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In this work we consider a collective decisionmaking process in a network of agents described by a nonlinear interconnected dynamical model with sigmoidal nonlinearities and signed interaction graph. The decisions are encoded in the equilibria of the system. The aim is to investigate this multiagent system when the signed graph representing the community is not structurally balanced and in particular as we vary its frustration, i.e., its distance to structural balance. The model exhibits bifurcations, and a "social effort" parameter, added to the model to represent the strength of the interactions between the agents, plays the role of bifurcation parameter in our analysis. We show that, as the social effort increases, the decision-making dynamics exhibits a pitchfork bifurcation behavior where, from a deadlock situation of "no decision" (i.e., the origin is the only globally stable equilibrium point), two possible (alternative) decision states for the community are achieved (corresponding to two nonzero locally stable equilibria). The value of social effort for which the bifurcation is crossed (and a decision is reached) increases with the frustration of the signed network.

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Multiequilibria Analysis for a Class of Collective Decision-Making Networked Systems

Cited by 21 publications

References 25 publications

Multiagent Decision-Making Dynamics Inspired by Honeybees

Multiagent Decision-Making Dynamics Inspired by Honeybees

A signed network perspective on the government formation process in parliamentary democracies

The Role of Frustration in Collective Decision-Making Dynamical Processes on Multiagent Signed Networks

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