Affiliations: Air Force Research Laboratory, Directed Energy Directorate, 3550 Aberdeen Ave SE, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM, USA | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, 2950 Hobson Way, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA
Note: [] The authors would like to acknowledge the funding and support of the AFOSR and AFRL. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
Abstract: Large-scale systems are part of a growing trend in distributed computing, and coordinating control of them is an increasing challenge. This paper presents a cooperative agent system that scales to one million or more nodes in which agents form coalitions to complete global task objectives. This approach uses the large-scale Command and Control (C2) capabilities of the Resource Clustered Chord (RC-Chord) Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer (HP2P) design. Tasks are submitted that require access to processing, data, or hardware resources, and a distributed agent search is performed to recruit agents to satisfy the distributed task. This approach differs from others by incorporating design elements to accommodate large-scale systems into the resource location algorithm. Peersim simulations demonstrate that the distributed coalition formation algorithm is as effective as an omnipotent central algorithm in a one million agent system.
Keywords: Distributed multi-agent system, hierarchical peer to peer, large-scale, command and control
