Separating Application-Specific and Organizational Coordination Issues during Multi-Agent Organizational Design and Instantiation

The ability to create effective multi-agent organizations is key to the development of larger, more diverse multi-agent systems. Organizational control provides longterm organizational goals, roles, and responsibilities as guidelines for each agent. Organizational design and instantiation is the process that accepts a set of organizational goals, performance requirements, agents, and resources and assigns responsibilities and roles to each agent. We present a prescriptive organizational design and instantiation process for multi-agent systems. An important aspect of our approach is the separation of application-specific organizational issues from more generic organizational coordination mechanisms. We describe our model of organizational design and our search process and provide examples of how it operates. We also present example organizations generated by our automated system for the distributed sensor network domain under different environmental characteristics and performance requirements. Effort sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory Air Force Materiel Command, USAF, under agreement number #F30602-99-2-0525. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. This material is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. IIS-0004112 and IIS-9988784. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratory, NSF, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or the U.S. Government.