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Managing Agent Interactions with Context-Driven Dynamic Organizations

  • Conference paper
Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems (EEMMAS 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5049))

Abstract

Organizations are at the heart of multi-agent systems. To deal with the ongoing dynamics and changes in the system, organizations have to adapt. Typically, agents are responsible to deal with the complexity of organization dynamics. In this paper, we present an approach for context-driven dynamic organizations in which the agent environment takes the burden of managing organization dynamics. Driven by the context, the agent environment manages the evolution of organizations and actively advertises roles to the agents, supporting the necessary collaborations between agents needed in the current context. We introduce a conceptual model for context-driven dynamic organizations and present a software architecture that supports the model in a distributed setting. The proposed approach separates the management of dynamic evolution of organizations from the actual functionality provided by the agents playing roles in the organizations. Separating these concerns makes it easier to understand, design, and manage organizations in multi-agent systems.

We show how we have applied context-driven dynamic organizations in a concrete case of monitoring traffic jams. In this case, camera agents associated with traffic monitoring cameras collaborate in organizations. Depending on the context, camera agents play different roles, with responsibilities ranging from simple measurement to data aggregation. When a traffic jam covers the viewing range of multiple cameras, organizations are dynamically merged, assuring cameras detecting the same traffic jam can collaborate. Vice versa, when a traffic jam dissolves, the organization is dynamically split up. Test results indicate that context-based dynamic organizations is a promising approach to support decentralized traffic monitoring.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DistriNet, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200 A, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium

    Robrecht Haesevoets, Bart Van Eylen, Danny Weyns, Alexander Helleboogh, Tom Holvoet & Wouter Joosen

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  1. Robrecht Haesevoets
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  2. Bart Van Eylen
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  3. Danny Weyns
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  4. Alexander Helleboogh
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  5. Tom Holvoet
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  6. Wouter Joosen
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Danny Weyns Sven A. Brueckner Yves Demazeau

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Haesevoets, R., Van Eylen, B., Weyns, D., Helleboogh, A., Holvoet, T., Joosen, W. (2008). Managing Agent Interactions with Context-Driven Dynamic Organizations. In: Weyns, D., Brueckner, S.A., Demazeau, Y. (eds) Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems. EEMMAS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5049. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85029-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85029-8_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85028-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85029-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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