It seems that there has been some confusion regarding the notion “plug-and-play” which often appears in our research works about the blended dynamics theorems, in particular, related to the notion of “open MAS.” Here, we clarify it as follows:
A distributed algorithm is said to be plug-and-play ready if, in the event of a sudden change in the network, (a) the operation of the algorithm (e.g., f-consensus) is restored after a transitory period to a new outcome reflecting the new situation, and (b) the restoration is accomplished through passive manipulation, along with the local initialization of any newly entering agent if necessary. Passive manipulation refers to the ability of an individual agent to take actions upon detecting changes in its neighboring connections without reactions from the neighboring agents. This is necessary for the case when the neighboring agents experience sudden malfunctioning so that any preparations cannot be expected from the neighboring agents. Local initialization means that, if some follow-up initialization is needed corresponding to the change, then it must be local, i.e., it must be free from global initialization which implies some action of all the agents in the whole network.