Multi-agent Action Research Articles

Difficulties with use of the Mental Health (Scotland) Act 1984 by general practitioners in rural Scotland

Aims and MethodAnecdotal evidence suggests that considerable difficulties are experienced in rural areas by isolated general practitioners, when detaining patients under the Mental Health (Scotland) Act1984. The aim of this study was to identify the range and extent of these difficulties in a structured way, and to identify ways of responding to them. A postal questionnaire was sent to 85 general practitioners in a sparsely populated area of Scotland to assess their experience of emergency detention.ResultsThe questionnaire response rate was 62%. Considerable difficulties were recorded from those who responded, notably their lack of support with clinical management during the delay between the patient's detention and the arrival of psychiatric staff, the lack of satisfactory places of safety for the patient during this period, and the difficult logistics of safe and satisfactory transport to hospital.Clinical ImplicationsRural general practitioners and their patients appear to be disadvantaged through lack of coordinated help in the management of inherently difficult and risky clinical situations. Even without additional resources, the process could be improved through coordinated, multi-agency action plans which take account of local conditions.

No time to think: protecting the reflective space in children's services

AbstractOver the past few years, first line managers in child care have faced mounting pressure on their time from both the national performance management agenda and the professional demands associated with the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families and Working Together to Safeguard Children: A Guide to Inter‐Agency Working to Safeguard and Promote the Welfare of Children. This paper briefly discusses the policy context surrounding this period of unprecedented change and focuses on the potential erosion of the reflective space in supervision as first line managers struggle to cope with the ever‐increasing expectations. An argument is made for the creative use of multi‐agency action learning/ research projects within the workplace to supplement individual supervision and promote reflective multi‐agency child care practice; some examples of successful projects are given. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Improving Multi-agency Coordination: Overcoming the Barriers to Communication – A Case Study

This paper explores the relevance and roles of communication processes in the failure of a multi-agency Drug Action Team (DAT) to function effectively and to coordinate the activities of the four participating agencies. In-depth interviews with seven purposely selected public agency staff were analysed according to the principles of grounded theory and of the constant comparative method. Four themes emerged to explain the difficulties experienced by the DAT representatives. These are: the nature of the task for which the representatives meet; the implications of mandated (‘forced’) coordination; the features of modern bureaucratic organisations; and the characteristics of multi-agency relations. The effects of deeply hidden cultural meanings in communication within and between the agencies are hypothesised and explored. The characteristics of occupational cultures proved particularly illuminating. Means for overcoming the DAT's difficulties are suggested and, finally, lessons for best practice in multi-agency bodies are highlighted.

A sound and complete algorithm for distributed commerce transactions

In a multi-party transaction (also called a distributed commerce transaction) agents face risks from dealing with untrusted agents. These risks are compounded in the face of deadlines, e.g., an agent may fail to deliver purchased goods by the time the goods are needed. We characterize the risks, and present a distributed algorithm that mitigates these risks, by using pairwise exchanges and trusted intermediaries. The algorithm generates a safe sequence of actions that completes a commerce transaction without risk, if such a sequence exists. We show that the algorithm is sound (produces only safe multi-agent action sequences) and complete (finds a safe sequence whenever one exists). The initial restriction of guaranteeing safety even when none of the principals trusts another can be relaxed in some cases, so we show how to handle principals that do trust each other and interact directly rather than through a trusted intermediary.

A case study in logical deconstruction: Formalizing J.D. Thompson's Organizations in Action in a multi-agent action logic

Logic is a popular word in the social sciences, but it is rarely used as a formal tool. In the past, the logical formalisms were cumbersome and difficult to apply to domains of purposeful action. Recent years, however, have seen the advance of new logics specially designed for representing actions. We present such a logic and apply it to a classical organization theory, J.D. Thompson's Organizations in Action. The working hypothesis is that formal logic draws attention to some finer points in the logical structure of a theory, points that are easily neglected in the discursive reasoning typical for the social sciences. Examining Organizations in Action we find various problems in its logical structure that should, and, as we argue, could be addressed.

Real-Time Simulation-Based Planning for Computer Generated Force Simulation

Automated Planning has been an active research topic for more than thirty years, but only recently has it started to move in the direction of combining planning and execution to achieve what is sometimes called Intelligent Reactive Planning. We propose Simutation-Based planning as a new way to perform intelligent reactive planning. Simulation-Based planning—unlike most other planning systems—integrates simulation into the planning process. Once a set of plans is generated, simulations are used to test and evaluate the plans to choose the most applicable plan for that current situation. In most planning systems, plan evaluation depends on rules alone, and because rules must be designed general enough to cover all possible cases, the evaluation is not specific enough for some individual cases. However, when the plan evaluation is done through simulations, the evaluation can be more fine-tuned to individual cases and can allow better plans to be chosen for that individual case. From the military planning perspective, the simulation-based planner is also quite useful due to its ability to perform adversarial and multi-agent planning. This is a natural consequence of using simulation in the planning process. By allowing other entities such as the enemy to simulate in parallel with the planner's forces, the planner is able to observe, prior to the actual execution, the effects of adversarial and multi-agent actions against its own plans.

A general framework for coherence in a CKBS

Coherence in a distributed system is meant to offset the disadvantages of distribution. The paper explores four issues under coherence, namely preservation of knowledge consistency across the agents, reliability of the overall system, integration of local solutions and the global performance. It presents some general strategies that can be employed to improve coherence in a CKBS, which include a weak consistency with versions for knowledge revision, and a recovery mechanism based on a hierarchic three-stage coordination, which ensures the correct isolation of potentially hierarchic multiagent actions. The paper goes on to identify the sources and classes of conflicts in global integration, and it suggests remedies, which at worst case would involve negotiation. In global performance, it focusses on planning and result synthesis, as the two most important problem domains, and suggests strategies ameliorate performance.