CoEvolFramework · Unified Framework for the Analysis of Co-evolutionary Systems

Unified Framework for the Analysis of Co-evolutionary Systems

Today's challenges are marked by more frequent and wide-spread episodes of social, economic, political and environmental crisis. Early studies have formulated these real-world problems in the setting of systems of many interacting adaptive agents involving situations of strategic decision-making. Coevolutionary systems are developed to provide natural realizations and powerful tools to understand conditions that affect the emergent (macro) behavior of these systems as populations of agents whose individual (micro) behaviors changes in response to their interaction outcomes. However, current state of the art research is limited by the complex relationships underlying agent interactions (structures) and their effects on the evolutionary change (dynamics) of the system's collective behavior. Studying these complex coevolutionary systems remains an open challenge as rich structures are not taken into account fully. This project aims to fill this major research gap with a unified, principled framework to analyze such complex coevolutionary systems. At the core of our approach is the directed graph (digraph) representation of interacting agent behaviors (strategies) where problem structures are fully captured by orientations in the complete graph and associated coevolutionary dynamics by sampling processes on the digraph. Our framework allows us to develop an in-depth qualitative understanding of those problem structures and construct tools for precise quantitative characterizations of any coevolutionary system. We are able to directly relate coevolutionary problem complexity arising from underlying cycle structures of its digraph representation and how it affects the dynamics of coevolutionary search processes.

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