Overcoming Communication Restrictions in Collectives

Many large distributed system are characterized by having a large number of components (eg., agents, neurons) whose actions and interactions determine a %orld utility” which rates the performance of the overall system. Such “collectives” are often subject to communication restrictions, making it difiicult for components which tzy to optimize their own “private” utilities, to take actions that also help optimize the world utility. In this article we address that coordination problem and derive four utility functions which present different compromises between how “aligned” a component’s private utility is with the world utility and how readily that component can determine the actions that optimize its utility. The results show that the utility functions specifically derived to operate under communication restrictions outperform both traditional methods and previous collectivebased methods by up to 75%.