Inproceedings,
Exploring Organizational Designs with TÆMS: A Case Study of Distributed Data Processing
ICMAS'96: Proc. 2nd Int'l Conf. on Multi-agent Systems, page 283--290. Kyoto, Japan, AAAI Press, (1996)
Abstract
When we design multi-agent systems for realistic, worth-oriented environments,
solving the coordination problems they present involves understanding
the intricate and sophisticated interplay between the domain and
the various system components. In this paper, we examine this interplay
using TAEMS and the GPGP (generalized partial global planning) approach
as a tool for quickly exploring multiple alternative organizations/coordination
strategies. We illustrate the flexibility of TAEMS-style task structures
for representing interesting multi-criteria coordination problems,
and the use of a new grammar-based generation tool to allow quicker
task structure experimentation. Using distributed data processing
as an example domain, we show how different coordination algorithms
of varying sophistication give rise to subtle effects in functionally-structured
agent organizations with interrelationships between functions. The
experiments presented in our paper serve to illustrate our claim
about the generality and flexibility of the TAEMS representation
for coordination problems and the grammar-based generators for modeling
domain semantics and experimenting with different aspects of such
domains.
