Communication and Self-Organization in Complex Systems: A Basic Approach

Complex Systems usually consist of a large number of interacting components; therefore multi-agent models can play a valuable role in exploring and simulating their dynamic behavior. In the first part of this paper we address some conceptual issues associated with designing agent-based models for complex systems. In the second part we investigate the dynamics of a “minimalistic” multi-agent system, where spatially distributed agents communicate via a spatiotemporal multicomponent “communication field”. For the example of a binary choice problem we find the emergence of a majority/minority relation among the agents. Moreover, the minority and the majority concentrate in particular spatial domains; thus we observe a spatial coordination of decisions as the result of a self-organization process based on the exchange of information. We also show by means of computer simulations that the subpopulation with the more efficient communication will have a better chance to become the majority in the system.