Coordinating Tasks in Agent Organizations

Support for new forms of organization and social interaction requires understanding the influence of structure on behavior. Goal dependencies indicate some relationship between roles, through which actions can be coordinated. Social relationships determine different types of power links between roles. Efficient coordination requires that goal dependency and power structure are well tuned to each other. In this paper, we will investigate what is the exact nature of this relationship between roles in an organization and what are the consequences of different structure forms. We will also see what is the difference if the relations are not hierarchical but organized through a market or network structure.

[1]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Structural Aspects of the Evaluation of Agent Organizations , 2006, COIN@AAMAS/ECAI.

[2]  A. Koller,et al.  Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language , 1969 .

[3]  B. Biddle.  Chapter Three – Roles , 1979 .

[4]  Franco Zambonelli,et al.  Coordination Models for Multi-Agent Systems , 1999 .

[5]  O. Williamson,et al.  Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications. , 1977 .

[6]  Andrea Omicini,et al.  Coordination artifacts: environment-based coordination for intelligent agents , 2004, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2004. AAMAS 2004..

[7]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  SILENT AGENTS: From Observation to Tacit Communication , 2006, IBERAMIA-SBIA.

[8]  A. Kellerman,et al.  The Constitution of Society : Outline of the Theory of Structuration , 2015 .

[9]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  The Role of Roles in Designing Effective Agent Organizations , 2002, SELMAS.

[10]  Jacques Ferber,et al.  From Agents to Organizations: An Organizational View of Multi-agent Systems , 2003, AOSE.

[11]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  A survey of multi-agent organizational paradigms , 2004, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[12]  Gerardine DeSanctis,et al.  Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory , 1994 .

[13]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Foundations of organizational structures in multiagent systems , 2005, AAMAS '05.

[14]  R. Duncan.  What is the right organization structure? Decision tree analysis provides the answer , 1979 .

[15]  Julian Padget,et al.  Formalizing a Language for Institutions and Norms , 2001, ATAL.

[16]  H. Weigand,et al.  Communication and deontic logic , 1995 .

[17]  Philip R. Cohen,et al.  Toward A Formalism for Conversation Protocols Using Joint Intention Theory , 2002, Comput. Intell..

[18]  Marian H. Nodine,et al.  A Metamodel for Agents, Roles, and Groups , 2004, AOSE.

[19]  F. Dignum,et al.  Structures for agent organizations , 2005, International Conference on Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems, 2005..

[20]  Kevin Crowston,et al.  The interdisciplinary study of coordination , 1994, CSUR.

[21]  M. V. Dignum,et al.  A Model for Organizational Interaction: based on Agents, founded in Logic , 2000 .

[22]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Autonomous agents with norms , 1999, Artificial Intelligence and Law.

[23]  Mark S. Fox,et al.  An organizational ontology for enterprise modeling , 1998 .

[24]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[25]  Mark Klein,et al.  Contractual Agent Societies , 2001 .

[26]  B. Biddle,et al.  Role Theory: Concepts and Research , 1966 .