Open Multi-Agent Systems With Discrete States and Stochastic Interactions

Abstract

We consider a multi-agent system in which agents arrive and depart from a network randomly as a Bernoulli process. Each agent that is active in the network must decide between two actions represented by 0 or 1. Each active agent then observes the action of a random neighbour and updates its preference towards a certain action. New agents that arrive into the network are activated with a random preference and action. This means that the notion of consensus in the standard sense can no longer be applied and instead, we provide conditions under which majority action preservation occurs when the number of agents is arbitrarily large. This property will imply that a large fraction of the active agent population will retain their action almost surely.