Positive impact of isomorphic changes in the environment on collective decision-making

Abstract

The performance of self-organized collective decision-making systems highly depends on the interactions with the environment. The environmental bias factors can introduce indirect modifications in the behaviour of such systems, however, not all changes are for the worse. In this paper, we show how the isomorphic changes in the environment can improve the performance of the collective decision-making strategies, mostly used in the current state-of-the-art swarm robotics research. The idea is based on the usage of a special kind of an equivalence relation, namely isomorphism, which provides local changes in the environment while preserving the global information. The obtained results indicate that the isomorphic transformations, sharing a certain structure of the environment, can significantly accelerate the consensus time without compromising correctness of the final decision.