Social Structure in Artificial Agent Societies: Implications for Autonomous Problem-Solving Agents

In Distributed Problem-solving systems a group of purposefully designed computational agents interact and co-ordinate their activities so as to jointly achieve a global task. Social co-ordination is a decentralised mechanism, that sets out from autonomous, non-benevolent agents that interact primarily to improve the degree of attainment of their local goals. One way of ensuring the effectiveness of social co-ordination with respect to global problem solving is to rely on self-interested agents and to coerce their behaviour in a desired direction. In this paper we model the notion of social structure for a particular class of multiagent domains, and determine its functionality with respect to social co-ordination. We show how social structure can be used to bias macrolevel properties in the frame of multiagent system design, and discuss microlevel implications respecting the architecture of autonomous problem-solving agents.