Transient Diversity in Multi-Agent Systems

Diversity is an important aspect of highly efficient multi-agent teams. We introduce the main factors that drive a multi-agent system in either direction along the diversity scale. A metric for diversity is described, and we speculate on the concept of transient diversity. Finally, an experiment on social entropy using a RoboCup simulated soccer team is presented. This research area is quite new, but we are assured that improved diversity management for multi-agent systems can make immediate contributions to existing agent-based applications as well as to long-range development in future multi-robot technologies.