Modelling Gossip Interactions in Open Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: We consider open multi-agent systems, which are systems subject to frequent arrivals and departures of agents while the studied process takes place. We study the behavior of all-to-all pairwise gossip interactions in such open systems. Arrivals and departures of agents imply that the composition and size of the system evolve with time, and in particular prevent convergence. We describe the expected behavior of the system by showing that the evolution of scale-independent quantities can be characterized exactly by a fixed-size linear dynamical system. We apply this approach to characterize the evolution of the two first moments (and thus also of the variance) for open systems of fixed and variable size. Our approach is based on the continuous-time modelling of random asynchronous events impacting the systems (gossip steps, arrivals, departures, and replacements), and can be extended to other types of events.