Revealing bullying patterns in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems communication is arguably difficult to be designed. An equal balance of communication among agents is usually desirable. When this does not happen, it affects the quality of service, causing poor performances in terms of response times. The aim of this work is to detect undesirable patterns of communication in these types of systems, using the metaphor of bullying. Though observed in social environments, it can also be applied to a multi-agent system scenario: it consists of some agents' continuous communications toward the same agents. This causes an unbalanced communication, overloading the receiver, which results in higher response times. Some metrics have been designed to measure the agents' communication, and some rules classify agents accordingly into several patterns regarding the bullying metaphor. Furthermore, the experimental results prove that the metrics based on the bullying metaphor are strongly related with the quality of service of multi-agent systems. The experimental results also show that the causes of a bad quality of service can be figured out by means of this bullying metaphor and their metrics and classification rules.