Publication - Automated Organization Design for Multi-agent Systems
| Authors: | Sims, Mark; Corkill, Daniel; Lesser, Victor | ||||
| Title: | Automated Organization Design for Multi-agent Systems | ||||
| Abstract: | The ability to create effectivemulti-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 roles to each agent. These long-term roles serve as organizational-control guidelines that are used by each agent in making moment-to-moment operational control decisions. An important aspect of KB-ORG is its efficient, knowledge-informed search 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. 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. KB-ORG designs are not restricted to a single organization form such as a hierarchy, and the organization designs described here contain both hierarchical and peer-to-peer elements. 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: | Multi-Agent Systems, Organizational Design | ||||
| Publication: | Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Vol: 16, Num: 2, pp. 151 - 185 | ||||
| Publisher: | Springer-Netherlands | ||||
| Date: | 2008 | ||||
| Sources: |
PDF: /Documents/sims_jaamas08.pdf |
||||
| Reference: | Sims, Mark; Corkill, Daniel; Lesser, Victor. Automated Organization Design for Multi-agent Systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Volume 16, Number 2, Springer-Netherlands, pp. 151-185. 2008. | ||||
| bibtex: | @article{Sims-448,
author = "Mark Sims and Daniel Corkill and Victor Lesser",
title = "{Automated Organization Design for Multi-agent
Systems}",
journal = "Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems",
volume = "16",
number = "2",
publisher = "Springer-Netherlands",
pages = "151-185",
year = "2008",
url = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/448",
}
|
||||
