Publication - Using Annotated Guidelines to Influence the Behavior of Organizationally Adept Agents

Authors: Corkill, Daniel, Zhang, Chongjie, Da Silva, Bruno, Kim, Yoonheui, Zhang, Xiaoqin, and Lesser, Victor
Title: Using Annotated Guidelines to Influence the Behavior of Organizationally Adept Agents
Abstract: An organizationally adept agent (OAA) adjusts its behavior when given annotated organizational guidelines. More importantly, it can also deter- mine when such guidelines become ineffective and proactively adapt its behavior to better achieve organizational objectives. A central OAA tenet is a clear sep- aration between operational decision making (the detailed moment-to-moment behavior decisions made by an agent) and organizational control (longer-term directives designed using estimates of environment and agent characteristics and expressed to agents as annotated guidelines that bias and inform their operational decision making). This separation enables the OAA to stop following guidelines when the estimates used in their design were incorrect or when the environment changes over time and to propose and negotiate agreements with other OAAs to replace such guidelines. We describe a fully operational OAA architecture that: 1) allows agents to operate reasonably without organizational guidelines; 2) uses belief values in operational decision making that are updated by experience and can be seeded by expecta- tions conveyed in guideline annotations; 3) assesses the appropriateness of guide- lines based on deviations from annotated estimates developed during their design; and 4) can make agreements to replace inappropriate guidelines. We present de- tails of this approach to agent organization and analyze its effectiveness using call-center OAAs striving to extinguish fires in RoboCup Rescue scenarios.
Keywords: Agent Control, Control, Coordination, Multi-Agent Systems, Organizational Design
Publication: 14th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms (COIN@AAMAS 2012)
Location: Valencia, Spain
Date: June 2012
Sources: PDF: http://ict1.tbm.tudelft.nl/coin2012/papers/20120046.pdf
Reference: Corkill, Daniel, Zhang, Chongjie, Da Silva, Bruno, Kim, Yoonheui, Zhang, Xiaoqin, and Lesser, Victor. Using Annotated Guidelines to Influence the Behavior of Organizationally Adept Agents. 14th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms (COIN@AAMAS 2012) . June 2012.
bibtex: 
@article{Corkill-517,
  author    = "Daniel Corkill and Chongjie Zhang and Bruno Da
               Silva and Yoonheui Kim and Xiaoqin Zhang and
               Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Using Annotated Guidelines to Influence the
               Behavior of Organizationally Adept Agents}",
  journal   = "14th International Workshop on Coordination,
               Organizations, Institutions, and Norms (COIN@AAMAS
               2012)  ",
  month     = "June",
  year      = "2012",
  address   = "Valencia, Spain",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/517",
}