A Survey of Emergent Behavior and Its Impacts in Agent-based Systems

• Published in: 2006 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics pp. 1295 - 1300
• Main Authors: Zhengping Li, Cheng Hwee Sim, Low, M.Y.H.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2006
• Subjects: Application software; Birds; Computer aided manufacturing; Computer integrated manufacturing; Drives; Emergent phenomena; Logistics; Real time systems; Software agents; Stability
• ISBN: 9780780397002; 0780397002
• ISSN: 1935-4576
• DOI: 10.1109/INDIN.2006.275846

Increasingly, software agents are evolving from the roles of facilitators into decision-makers in managing complex, real-time systems such as logistics enterprise. Emergent behavior is that which is not attributed to any individual (agent), but is a global outcome of individual (agent) coordination. While agent's degree of autonomy and responsibility will continue to increase with time, the impact of emergent behavior in agent system on the performance and stability of these systems become an important issue. We found that emergent behavior is a major concern of potential users while we try to apply agent technology to such industry areas as transportation planning and logistics coordination. To really make agent technology work in industry convincingly, it is valuable to do a study of emergent behaviour and its impacts to the application of agent technology. This paper reviews the research on emergent behaviour, discuss its research challenge and application impact, and suggest research directions on agent emergent behaviour.