Towards Dynamic Reorganization of Agent Societies

In this paper, which is exploratory in nature, we discuss reorganization issues in agent societies. We are interested in how and why organizations change, and how can reorganization be done dynamically, with minimal interference from the system designer. It is evident that changes in the environment trigger reorganization, but in which situations do agents decide to modify their behavior, and when is a complete change of the organization structure needed? We present a classification of reorganization situations, based on the focus of the reorganization, the authority to modify the organization, and how reorganization decisions are taken. We will also discuss the requirements for agent models necessary to allow for dynamic, automatic adaptation to the reorganized system.

[1]  D. G. Galley.  The C-process: a model of command , 1987 .

[2]  J. S. Evans.  STRATEGIC FLEXIBILITY FOR HIGH TECHNOLOGY MANOEUVRES: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK , 1991 .

[3]  Milind Tambe,et al.  I'm OK, you're OK, we're OK: experiments in distributed and centralized socially attentive monitoring , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[4]  Piero Mussio,et al.  Emergent Evolution of Cooperative Structures , 1999 .

[5]  Destabilizing networks , 2002 .

[6]  Guillermo Ricardo Simari,et al.  Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence , 2000 .

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

[8]  Michael J. Prietula,et al.  Computational organization theory , 1994 .

[9]  Hans Weigand,et al.  Toward an organization-oriented design methodology for agent societies , 2003 .

[10]  Michael P. Wellman.  A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems , 1993, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[11]  Philip Selznick,et al.  TVA and the grass roots : a study of politics and organization , 1980 .

[12]  F. Eggan,et al.  The savage mind . Structure and function in primitive society , 1999 .

[13]  Brahim Chaib-draa,et al.  An overview of distributed artificial intelligence , 1996 .

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

[15]  Milind Tambe,et al.  Role allocation and reallocation in multiagent teams: towards a practical analysis , 2003, AAMAS '03.

[16]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  An Organizational Self-Design Model for Organizational Change , 1993 .

[17]  Sascha Ossowski,et al.  Co-ordination in Artificial Agent Societies: Social Structures and Its Implications for Autonomous Problem-Solving Agents , 1998 .

[18]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  The Gaia Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design , 2000, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

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

[20]  Milind Tambe,et al.  Towards Flexible Teamwork , 1997, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[21]  Hans Weigand,et al.  Specification by Refinement and Agreement: Designing Agent Interaction Using Landmarks and Contracts , 2002, ESAW.

[22]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[23]  Michael Luck,et al.  Towards a Methodology for Coordination Mechanism Selection in Open Systems , 2002, ESAW.

[24]  Gail E. Kaiser,et al.  A Mobile Agent Approach to Process-Based Dynamic Adaptation of Complex Software Systems , 2001, EWSPT.

[25]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Towards a social level characterisation of socially responsible agents , 1997, IEE Proc. Softw. Eng..

[26]  Kojima.  Structure and function , 2005 .

[27]  Markus Hannebauer,et al.  Autonomous Dynamic Reconfiguration in Multi-Agent Systems , 2002, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[28]  Jacques Ferber,et al.  A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems , 1998, Proceedings International Conference on Multi Agent Systems (Cat. No.98EX160).

[29]  Philippe Morignot,et al.  The Reorganization of Societies of Autonomous Agents , 1997, MAAMAW.

[30]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  Entropy and self-organization in multi-agent systems , 2001, AGENTS '01.