Scaling up multi-agent systems through organizational structuring

Abstract

Summary form only given. Over the last four years, the author has been working on the design of a distributed sensor network for vehicle tracking using adaptive radar sensors. This effort has reignited his long-term interest in the use of organizational structuring for handling scaling issues in multiagent systems. In This work, he first examines how organizational structuring was used in their design to reduce the computational and communication load involved in coordinating agent activities, and he discusses experiments that indicate the complex set of issues that need to be considered in evaluating the effectiveness of different organizational variants. He also briefly illustrates how it is possible to model the performance of these variants analytically, and predicts their performance. He then presents bottom-up techniques, based on negotiation, for organizational instantiation and adaptation in a dynamic environment. Finally, he discusses some work on a knowledge-based top-down approach for organizational design.