title: Efficient Sharing of Conflicting Opinions with Minimal Communication  in Large Decentralised Teams
creator: Pryymak, Oleksandr
creator: Rogers, Alex
creator: Jennings, Nicholas R
subject: Agent-based Computing
subject: Agile Teaming
description: In large decentralised teams agents often share uncertain  and conflicting information across the network,  and it is a major challenge for team members  to reach accurate conclusions individually. Previously,  this problem was approached by introducing  a communication overhead in order to reason  about the accuracy of information or to reach agreements  interactively. We address the more challenging  problem of improving the accuracy in settings  where communication is strictly limited to sharing  opinions about the real state of the common subject  of interest. We do so by presenting a novel  decentralised algorithm, AAT, which reaches the  settings of emergent behaviour in a team where  agents’ opinions becomes dramatically more accurate.  We show that our solution significantly outperforms  the existing algorithm, DACOR, and delivers  an accuracy of opinions close to a team pretuned  for the highest performance by empirical exploration  of its parameters. Moreover, in contrast  to the message-passing DACOR, our algorithm has  a minimal communication requirement, where only  opinions are shared, as well as significantly lower  computational expenses. Finally, AAT delivers a  high accuracy of opinions in settings where up to  half of the team does not participate in optimising  sharing parameters.
date: 2011
type: Conference or Workshop Item
type: PeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://www.orchid.ac.uk/eprints/4/1/Efficient_Sharing_of_Conflicting_Opinions.pdf
identifier:   Pryymak, Oleksandr and Rogers, Alex and Jennings, Nicholas R  (2011) Efficient Sharing of Conflicting Opinions with Minimal Communication in Large Decentralised Teams.  In: Workshop on Link Analysis in Heterogeneous Information Networks (IJCAI-11), 16 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain.    (In Press)  
relation: http://www.orchid.ac.uk/eprints/4/