Challenges to Scaling-Up Agent Coordination Strategies

There is more to scaling up agent-based systems than simply increasing the number of agents involved. Many of the challenges to making agent-based systems work in more realistic settings arise from the characteristics of the agents’ tasks and environment, and the expectations of the systems’ users. In this chapter, my goal is thus to emphasize this broader array of challenges to coordinating agent-based systems, as a step both towards extending our understanding of scale-up issues as well as towards developing richer metrics for evaluating the degree to which coordination strategies for agent-based systems can apply to more demanding applications.

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