Evolutionary Adaptation in Autonomous Agent Systems — A Paradigm for the Emerging Enterprise

The enterprise of the future needs to be flexible, adaptive, and to respond rapidly to market demands and opportunities. This, in turn, demands a flexible, adaptive infrastructure. A plausible way to achieve such an infrastructure is to base its organisation on autonomous agents, where each agent responds locally to the intra- and extra-organisational forces it experiences. Enterprise adaptation then arises as an emergent effect. The theories of Holland, and related work on complex adaptive systems, have a direct bearing on the emergence of system adaptation from the interaction of locally adaptive entities. This paper ties Holland's theory of artificial and natural adaptive systems to autonomous agent systems. To illustrate the use of these theories in this context, the paper presents a system of evolving autonomous agents, interacting in a simulated producer/consumer economic world. The paper presents preliminary results with the producer/consumer, evolving agents system, and discusses the implications of these results for evolving, adaptive enterprise infrastructure systems.

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