The Effects of Runtime Coordination Strategies Within Static Organizations

Much work in multiagent systems has been devoted to developing runtime mechanisms to coordinate computational agents. However, the efficacy of such mechanisms depends to a large extent on the opportunities for flexible choices of action imposed by the implicit or explicit organizational relationships among agents. This paper examines the dependencies between the design of static organizational structures and the efficacy of runtime coordination. We show that runtime coordination strategies can be viewed as transforming the configuration of an organization, with principled effects on the expected performance of the agent system. By understanding these effects in the context of organizations, we can begin to articulate the conditions under which the introduction of coordination mechanisms (and their associated costs) can be justified.