Publication - Organizationally Adept Agents

Authors: Corkill, Daniel; Durfee, Edmund; Lesser, Victor; Zafar, Huzaifa; Zhang, Chongjie
Title: Organizationally Adept Agents
Abstract: An organizationally adept agent (OAA) is not only aware that it is part of an agent organization and about its role(s) in that organization, but it can also assess how well it is fulfilling its organizational responsibilities and can proactively adapt its behaviors to meet organizational needs better. OAAs evaluate their behaviors based not only on their (agent-centric) self-interests, but also on their (organization-centric) responsibilities to each other and their (social-centric) willingness to perform activities requested by other agents. Agent organizations designed for less adept agents must specify detailed guidelines that, when blindly followed, will influence individual agents to work together in the expected environment. However, if the environment deviates from expectations, such detailed organizational guidelines can mislead agents into counterproductive or even catastrophic behaviors. Organizations designed for OAAs, on the other hand, can assume that agents will reason about organizational expectations, and will adjust their behaviors when the nominal guidelines misalign with those expectations. We describe an extended BDI reasoning architecture for an OAA that balances organizational, social, and agent-centric interests and can adjust this balance when appropriate. Then we show how we used the reasoning architecture with agents operating in RoboCup Rescue scenarios.
Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Organizational Design
Publication: 12th International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN@AAMAS 2011), pp. 15 - 30
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Date: May 2011
Sources: PDF: /Documents/coinsws_aamas11.pdf
Notes: Held in conjunction with 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-11).
Reference: Corkill, Daniel; Durfee, Edmund; Lesser, Victor; Zafar, Huzaifa; Zhang, Chongjie. Organizationally Adept Agents. 12th International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN@AAMAS 2011), pp. 15-30. May 2011. Held in conjunction with 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-11).
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{Corkill-500,
  author    = "Daniel Corkill and Edmund Durfee and Victor Lesser
               and Huzaifa Zafar and Chongjie Zhang",
  title     = "{Organizationally Adept Agents}",
  booktitle = "12th International Workshop on Coordination,
               Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent
               Systems (COIN@AAMAS 2011)",
  pages     = "15-30",
  month     = "May",
  year      = "2011",
  address   = "Taipei, Taiwan",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/500",
}