Effects of periodic communication on distributed decision-making

A set of performance scenarios as a function of periodic communication is hypothesized and leads to an analysis of optimal communication rates. In general, the performance should decrease over time until new information arrives concerning the global state. To explore the hypothesis, a model of distributed game automata that make decisions probabilistically concerning group or coalition formation. The uncertainty in the players´ coalition strategies can be reduced by increasing communication but at the expense of more overhead. In a job scheduling application, the players make good decisions concerning group formation only if there is sufficient communication. The results agree with the hypothesized trade-off of decision quality versus communication overhead