Open multi-agent systems with fixed-sized and possibly not complete topologies

Details

Supervisors

Hendrickx, Julien

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en mathématiques appliquées

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are systems composed of intelligent agents interacting with one another. Such systems are commonly represented by a graph in which each agent is a node holding a randomly distributed value and each interaction is an edge. They have proved to be a powerful tool in various applications such as opinion dynamic modelling. However, in many applications, especially when the size of the system is large, agents are likely to leave or enter the system. In other words, at each time step, nodes and edges can be added or deleted in the graph representing the system. Such systems, called open multi-agent systems, have been recently introduced and are not yet well understood. More precisely, they have been analyzed only in the simple case where the graph representing the system is complete. The goal of this master thesis is to investigate other graph structures with the only constraint that the number of nodes does not vary with time, i.e., the arrival of an agent always coincides with the departure of another one. For instance, the behaviour of bipartite graphs is studied. A rule between the structure of a system and the variance of the values held by the agent is also provided. As an application, the PageRank problem is revisited using an open decentralized method.