Publication - Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale Agent Systems

Authors: Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor
Title: Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale Agent Systems
Abstract: As the scale and scope of multi-agent systems grow, it becomes increasingly important to design and manage the manner in which the participants interact. The potential for bottlenecks, intractably large sets of coordination partners, and shared bounded resources can make individual and high-level goals difficult to achieve. To address these problems, many large systems employ an additional layer of structuring, known as an organizational design, that assigns agents particular and different roles, responsibilities and peers. These additional constraints allow agents to operate effectively within a large-scale system, with little or no sacrifice in utility. Different designs applied to the same problem will have different performance characteristics, therefore it is important to understand and model the behavior of candidate designs. In this paper, we will introduce a domain-independent organizational design representation capable of modeling and predicting the quantitative performance characteristics of agent organizations. This representation can support the selection of an appropriate design given a particular operational context. We will demonstrate how the language can be used to represent complex interactions, and show modeling techniques that can address the combinatorics of large-scale agent systems.
Keywords: Information Retrieval, Organizational Design
Publication: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 297 - 312
Location: Kyoto, Japan
Date: December 2004
Sources: PDF: /Documents/bhorling/MMAS04-ODML.pdf
Reference: Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale Agent Systems. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 297-312. December 2004.
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{Horling-376,
  author    = "Bryan Horling and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale
               Agent Systems}",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the International Workshop on
               Massively Multi-Agent Systems",
  pages     = "297-312",
  month     = "December",
  year      = "2004",
  address   = "Kyoto, Japan",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/376",
}