Abstract
As the scale and scope of multi-agent systems grow, it becomes increasingly important to manage the manner in which the participants interact. The potential for bottlenecks, intractably large sets of coordination partners, and shared bounded resources can make individual and high-level goals difficult to achieve. To address these problems, many large systems employ an additional layer of structuring, known as an organizational design, that assigns agents particular and different roles, responsibilities and peers. These additional constraints can allow agents to operate effectively within a large-scale system. In this paper, we will introduce a domain-independent organizational design representation capable of modeling and predicting the quantitative performance characteristics of agent organizations. This representation supports the selection of an appropriate design given a particular operational context. We will demonstrate how the language can be used to represent complex interactions, and show modeling techniques that can address the combinatorics of large-scale agent systems.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-9988784. This material is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers Program under NSF Award No. EEC-0313747. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Corkill, D.D., Lander, S.E.: Diversity in Agent Organizations. Object Magazine 8, 41–47 (1998)
Horling, B., Mailler, R., Lesser, V.: A Case Study of Organizational Effects in a Distributed Sensor Network. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2004), Beijing, China (2004)
Zhang, H., Lesser, V.: A Dynamically Formed Hierarchical Agent Organization for a Distributed Content Sharing System. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT 2004 (2004)
Decker, K., Lesser, V.R.: Quantitative Modeling of Complex Environments. International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management. Special Issue on Mathematical and Computational Models and Characteristics of Agent Behaviour 2, 215–234 (1993)
Fox, M.S.: Organization structuring: Designing large complex software. Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-79-155, Carnegie-Mellon University (1979)
Pattison, H.E., Corkill, D.D., Lesser, V.R.: Instantiating Descriptions of Organizational Structures. Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Research Notes in Artificial Intelligence I, 59–96 (1987)
DeLoach, S.: Modeling organizational rules in the multi-agent systems engineering methodology. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence on Advances in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1–15. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg (2002)
Hübner, J.F., Sichman, J.S., Boissier, O.: A model for the structural, functional, and deontic specification of organizations in multiagent systems. In: Bittencourt, G., Ramalho, G.L. (eds.) SBIA 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2507, pp. 118–128. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Dignum, V., Vazquez-Salceda, J., Dignum, F.: A model of almost everything: Norms, structure and ontologies in agent organizations. In: Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (2004)
Horling, B., Mailler, R., Shen, J., Vincent, R., Lesser, V.: Using Autonomy, Organizational Design and Negotiation in a Distributed Sensor Network. In: Lesser, V., Ortiz, C., Tambe, M. (eds.) Distributed Sensor Networks: A multiagent perspective, pp. 139–183. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2003)
Durfee, E.H., Montgomery, T.A.: Coordination as distributed search in a hierarchical behavior space. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 21, 1363–1378 (1991)
Sims, M., Goldman, C., Lesser, V.: Self-Organization through Bottom-up Coalition Formation. In: Proceedings of Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2003), pp. 867–874. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Horling, B., Lesser, V. (2005). Quantitative Organizational Models for Large-Scale Agent Systems. In: Ishida, T., Gasser, L., Nakashima, H. (eds) Massively Multi-Agent Systems I. MMAS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3446. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11512073_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11512073_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26974-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31889-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)