The Neglected Pieces of Designing Collective Decision-Making Processes

Yara Khaluf; Pieter Simoens; Heiko Hamann

doi:10.3389/frobt.2019.00016

The Neglected Pieces of Designing Collective Decision-Making Processes

Front Robot AI. 2019 Mar 26:6:16. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00016. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Yara Khaluf¹, Pieter Simoens¹, Heiko Hamann²

Affiliations

¹ IDLab, Ghent University-Imec, Ghent, Belgium.
² Institute of Computer Engineering, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.

Abstract

Autonomous decision-making is a fundamental requirement for the intelligent behavior of individual agents and systems. For artificial systems, one of the key design prerequisites is providing the system with the ability to make proper decisions. Current literature on collective artificial systems designs decision-making mechanisms inspired mostly by the successful natural systems. Nevertheless, most of the approaches focus on voting mechanisms and miss other fundamental aspects. In this paper, we aim to draw attention to the missed pieces for the design of efficient collective decision-making, mainly information processes in its two types of stimuli and options set.

Keywords: collective system design (CSD); decision-making process; information processing; multi-agent system (MAS); swarm robotics.