Applying Organizational Self-Design to a Real-world Volunteer Computing System

Organizations are a basis for task allocation, resource allocation and coordination in multiagent systems. Organizational Self-Design (OSD) is an approach to designing suitable organizations at run-time in which the agents are responsible for constructing their own organizational structures. OSD has also been shown to be especially suited for environments that are dynamic or semi-dynamic. One application of OSD is to allocate and manage resources in grid, cloud and volunteer computing systems. Whereas there has been a body of theoretical research on the underpinnings and algorithms that can be used for OSD, we aren’t aware of any implemented system that uses OSD for these kind of applications. This paper bridges this gap by applying OSD to a real-world volunteer computing system. We show that applying OSD to such a system results in better throughput than the current task allocation methods.