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Tore Knabe
Multi-Agent Systems Group
DFKI, Geb. 43.8
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken

E-mail: tokn@dfki.de.DELETE
          
 
  

Business Organizational Forms in Self-organizing Multiagent Systems

Keywords: multi-agent systems, self-organization, scheduling, protocol design

Supervisor: Michael Schillo



This thesis investigates whether organizational forms derived from sociological models of real-world business organizations can increase the performance of a market-based multiagent system. The market consists of customer agents who have tasks to assign and provider agents who have the resources to complete the tasks. The tasks can be complex, so that completing a task requires several provider agents to work together. The multiagent system's efficency is measured by several performance measures. We hypothesize that the efficiency can be increased if repetitive patterns in the customer tasks or their subtasks are mirrored by corresponding structures on provider side in the form of organizations. We further hypothesize that provider agents can be programmed to increase the system's efficiency on their own by self-organizing, i.e., by changing their organizational structure based on information locally available to them.

We specify a number of selected organizational forms derived from sociology and specify a mechanism for self-organization. We also develop new communication protocols that help to structure the coordination processes of task assignment and self-organization among the agents. The concepts proposed in this thesis have been implemented in a testbed that has been used for the experimental evaluation of the ideas of this thesis and is planed to serve for further research in the interdisciplinary field socionics.

Our evaluation showed that the concepts of organizations and self-organization can improve the efficiency of multiagent systems. We describe which organizations are suited for what circumstances, when self-organization is advisable, and give examples of possible applications of these concepts in other systems.

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