Coordination of Distributed Information and Decisions

近年来，人们越来越认识到多主体协调的重要性，现在已经达到了一种真正的紧迫感。在工程文献中，已经尝试在多种领域解决这个问题，如多用户信息理论、分布式估计和检测理论以及分散控制。经济学家也长期关注这些问题。利用市场机制协调分配的手段、欲望和信息是经济研究的一个中心领域。在过去的十年里，致力于分布式计算的计算机科学家也开始解决协调问题。随便看一本科普杂志，你就会发现当今世界信息日益分散的本质，以及明智地应对这一趋势的时效性。特别是，将工程学、经济学和计算科学等不同领域的思想结合起来，并将它们形成一个连贯的协调理论，这是相当重要的。关于多智能体协调理论的工作可以大致分为(i)建立协调成本的基本界限，（ii）理解协调的最佳机制，以及（iii）在大量智能体参与协调任务的情况下的调查聚合方法。

Recognition of the importance of multiagent coordination has mounted over recent years, to the degree that it has now assumed a genuine sense of urgency. In the engineering literature, attempts have been made to address this issue in areas as varied as multiuser information theory, the theory of distributed estimation and detection, and decentralized control. Economists have also had a long standing concern with these issues. Coordination of distributed means, desires and information using market mechanisms is a central area of economic research. Computer scientists working on distributed computing also have begun to address coordination issues over the past decade. A glance at any popular science magazine will reveal the increasingly distributed nature of information in today's world and the timeliness of addressing this trend intelligently. In particular, it is of considerable importance to combine ideas form such diverse areas as engineering, economics and computational sciences, and fashion them into a coherent theory of coordination. The proposed work on multiagent coordination theory can be roughly classified as (i) establishing fundamental bounds on the costs of enabling coordination, (ii) understanding the optimal mechanisms of coordination, and (iii) investigation aggregation methods for situations where large numbers of agents are involved in the coordination task.