Agents misbehaving in a network: A vice or a virtue?

Abstract

Misbehaviors among the agents in a network might be intentional or unintentional, they might cause a system-wide failure or they might improve the performance or even enable us to achieve an objective. In this article we consider examples of these possible scenarios. First, we argue the necessity of monitoring the agents in a network to detect if they are misbehaving or not and outline a distributed method in which each agent monitors its neighbors for any sign of misbehavior. Later, we focus on solving the problem of distributed leader selection via forcing the agents to temporarily misbehave, and introduce an algorithm that enables the agents in a network to select their leader without any..