Shared Focus of Attention for Heterogeneous Agents (Short Paper)

A network of cooperating agents must be able to reach rough consensus on a set of topics for cooperation. With highly heterogeneous agents, however, incommensurable measures and imprecise translation render ordinary consensus algorithms inappropriate. I present a distributed mechanism for shared focus of attention that begins to address these problems, using an engineered emergence approach inspired by recent results on the dynamics of evolution in systems with spatial extent. Simulation shows that the algorithm converges in time proportional to the diameter of the network and gives a range of reasonable settings for the parameters.