Chapter X. Designing Organizations for Computational Agents

Organizing is important in computational systems, just as it is important in human systems. Organizational knowledge allows a computational system to recognize its role, and the roles of others, in accomplishing collective goals. However, as circumstances change, often organizational structures must change also. It is therefore important to understand how different organizations can be designed for different populations of agents, performing different tasks in changing environments, to meet various performance goals. Our work has been directed toward understanding this design space, and characterizing the effectiveness of different organizations. In this paper, we describe a framework for understanding organization design for computational agents, use our framework for analyzing the expected performance of a class of organizations, and describe how our analyses can be applied to predict performance for a distributed information gathering task. Our ongoing work includes making organizational design an inherent part of a multiagent system, rather than something done by an external designer.