Adapting an Organization Design through Domain-Independent Diagnosis

Coordination is an essential technique in multi-agent systems. However, sophisticated coordination strategies are not always cost-effective in all problem-solving situations. This reinforces the need of situationspecific control rules, in which the benefits and the costs of coordination for the current situation are taken into account. We focus here on situation-specific control based on a long-term understanding of the frequency of tasks occurring, the characteristics of these tasks in terms of their resource and coordination needs, and the available resources. Another way of describing this type of long-term situation-specific control is an organizational design. In this paper, we assume that we are given an initial organizational design. However, as the characteristics of the environment change, this organizational design needs to be adapted. We discuss a domain-independent approach to detecting that some important aspects of the environment may have changed and to diagnosing/explaining exactly what these changes are. This work is done in terms of the GPGP/TÆMS domainindependent coordination architecture.