Improve consensus via decentralized predictive mechanisms

Abstract

For biogroups and groups of self-driven agents, making decisions often depends on interactions among group members. In this paper, we seek to understand the fundamental predictive mechanisms used by group members in order to perform such coordinated behaviors. In particular, we show that the future dynamics of each node in the network can be predicted solely using local information provided by its neighbors. Using this predicted future dynamics information, we propose a decentralized predictive consensus protocol, which yields drastic improvements in terms of both consensus speed and internal communication cost. In natural science, this study provides an evidence for the idea that some decentralized predictive mechanisms may exist in widely-spread biological swarms/flocks. From the industrial point of view, incorporation of a decentralized predictive mechanism allows for not only a significant increase in the speed of convergence towards consensus but also a reduction in the communication energy required to achieve a predefined consensus performance. © EPLA, 2009.