AASMAn: An adaptive organisational policy for a society of market-based agents

Abstract

Several formalisms for implementing organisational policies that assign specific roles to each of the agents in a multi-agent system (MAS) have been proposed like the contract net protocol, the social reasoning mechanism and the distributed computational economy. However, as no single organisation is appropriate in all situations, organisation self design had been proposed to allow an organisation of problem solvers to adapt itself to a dynamically changing environment. In this paper we propose an adaptive organisational framework that exploits and integrates the essential features of these existing organisational policies not only to meet the needs of time constrained noncritical applications, where computational load on the organisation cannot be predicted ahead of time, but also to utilise the available system resources efficiently. We also introduce the notion of decommitments and penalties in this approach which was not present in the original contract net protocol.