Designing Cooperative IS: Exploring and Evaluating Alternatives

At the early stages of the cooperative information system development one of the major problems is to explore the space of alternative ways of assignment and delegations of goals among system actors. The exploration process should be guided by a number of criteria to determine whether the adopted alternative is good-enough. This paper frames the problem of designing actor dependency networks as a multi-agent planning problem and adopts an off-the-shelf planner to offer a tool (P-Tool) that generates alternative actor dependency networks, and evaluates them in terms of metrics derived from Game Theory literature. As well, we offer preliminary experimental results on the scalability of the approach.