Publication - Knowledgeable Automated Organization Design for Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Sims, Mark; Corkill, Daniel; and Lesser, Victor
Title: Knowledgeable Automated Organization Design for Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: The ability to create effective multi-agent organizations is key to the development of larger, more diverse multi-agent systems. In this article we present KB-ORG: a fully automated, knowledge-based organization designer for multi-agent systems. Organization design is the process that accepts organizational goals, environmental expectations, performance requirements, role characterizations, and agent descriptions and assigns responsibilities and roles to each agent. These long-term responsibilities and roles serve as organizational-control guidelines that are used by each agent in making minute-by-minute operational control decisions. An important aspect of KB-ORG is its efficient, knowledge-informedsearch process for designing multi-agent organizations. KB-ORG uses both application-level and coordination-level organization design knowledge to explore the combinatorial search space of candidate organizations selectively. KB-ORG also delays making coordination-level organizational decisions until it has explored and elaborated candidate application-level agent roles and responsibilities. This approach significantly reduces the exploration effort required to produce effective designs as compared to modeling and evaluation-based approaches that do not incorporate design expertise. In this article, we use examples from the distributed sensor network (DSN) domain to show how KB-ORG uses situational parameters as well as application-level and coordination-level knowledge to generate organization designs. We also show that KB-ORG designs effective, yet substantially different, organizations when given different organizational requirements and environmental expectations.
Keywords: Coordination, Multi-Agent Systems, Organizational Design
Publication: UMass Computer Science Technical Report 07-43
Date: August 2007
Sources: PS: /Documents/msims/07-43.ps.gz
PDF: /Documents/07-43.pdf
Notes: Submitted to JAAMAS
Reference: Sims, Mark; Corkill, Daniel; and Lesser, Victor. Knowledgeable Automated Organization Design for Multi-Agent Systems. UMass Computer Science Technical Report 07-43. August 2007. Submitted to JAAMAS
bibtex: 
@techreport{Mark Sims-438,
  author    = "Mark Sims and Daniel Corkill and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Knowledgeable Automated Organization Design for
               Multi-Agent Systems}",
  month     = "August",
  year      = "2007",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/438",
}