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 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 can allow agents to operate effectively within a large-scale system. 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 supports 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: Organizational Design
Publication: Massively Multi-Agent Systems I, Vol: LNAI 3446, pp. 121 - 135
Editor: Ishida, Toru; Gasser, Les; and Nakashima, Hideyuki
Location: Kyoto, Japan
Publisher: Springer-Verlag, Berlin
Date: 2005
Sources: HTML: http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/376
Reference: Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale Agent Systems. Massively Multi-Agent Systems I, Volume LNAI 3446, Ishida, Toru; Gasser, Les; and Nakashima, Hideyuki, ed., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 121-135. 2005.
bibtex: 
@incollection{Horling-393,
  author    = "Bryan Horling and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale
               Agent Systems}",
  booktitle = "Massively Multi-Agent Systems I",
  volume    = "LNAI 3446",
  editor    = "Toru Ishida and Les Gasser and Hideyuki Nakashima",
  publisher = "Springer-Verlag, Berlin",
  pages     = "121-135",
  year      = "2005",
  address   = "Kyoto, Japan",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/393",
}