Analyzing the tradeoffs between breakup and cloning in the context of organizational self-design

Organizational Self-Design (OSD) has been proposed as an approach to constructing suitable organizations at runtime 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 and semi-dynamic. Most existing OSD approaches work by changing the organizational structure in response to changes in the environment — usually by spawning a new agent when an agent is overloaded and composing agents when they are free. One approach to spawning involves "breaking" up a problem into smaller sub-problems and assigning one of the sub-problems to the newly spawned agent. An alternative approach works by "cloning" the source agent and assigning the clone agent a portion of the source’s work load. We posit that both of these approaches are complementary, have their own advantages, and can be used together. In this paper we analyze the tradeoffs between cloning and breakup and generate a hybrid model that uses both cloning and breakup to generate more suitable organizations than those that could be generated when using a single approach.