Coordinating distributed actions via agent voting

This paper investigates the use of voting policies to coordinate routing decisions in a phone network. Although the social metaphor of voting has been applied to network coordination decision tasks, this study presents the first operational example of a vote-theoretic group decision support system (GDSS) for nodes. The experimental evidence shows that a collective choice voting policy dominates a policy of individual, hierarchical voting in minimizing movement toward system saturation and promoting load balancing. This result provides a basis for using voting policies to create more complex self-correcting networks.