Abstract
There is an increasing demand for designers and developers to construct ever larger multi-agent systems. Such systems will be composed of hundreds or even thousands of autonomous agents. Moreover, in open and dynamic environments, the number of agents in the system at any one time will fluctuate significantly. To cope with these twin issues of scalability and variable numbers, we hypothesize that multi-agent systems need to be both self-building (able to determine the most appropriate organizational structure for the system by themselves at run-time) and adaptive (able to change this structure as their environment changes). To evaluate this hypothesis we have implemented sucham ulti-agent system and have applied it to the domain of automated trading. Preliminary results supporting the first part of this hypothesis are presented: adaption and self-organization do indeed make the system better able to cope with large numbers of agents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
J.-M. André, J.-M., Mouginot, A., Venet, M.: A Framework for Dynamic Reorganization. Ninth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1990) 31–37
Baligh, H.H., Damon, W.W.: Foundations for a Systematic Process of Organization Structure Design. Journal of Information & Optimization Sciences 1(2) (1980) 133–165
Brazier, F.M.T., Jonker, CM., Treur, J., Wijngaards, N.J.E.: Deliberate Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems. Third Annual International Conference on Autonomous Agents (1999) 356–357
Costa, A.C.R., Demazeau, Y.: Toward a Formal Model of Multi-Agent Systems with Dynamic Organization. Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (1996) 431
De Wilde P., Nwana, H.S., Lee, L.C.: Stability, Fairness and Scalability of Multi-Agent Systems. International Journal of Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems 3(2) (1999) 84–91
Foner, L., Crabtree, I.B.: Multi-agent matchmaking. British Telecom Technology Journal 14(4) (1996)
Foss, J.D., Garcha, K., Turner, P.J., Jennings, N.R.: Brokerage in an Information Economy. INET 2000, 10th Annual Internet Society Conference, Yokohama, Japan (2000)
Fox, M.S.: An Organizational View of Distributed Systems. IEEE Transactions of Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 11(1) (1981) 70–79
Galbraith, J.: Designing complex organizations. Addison-Wesley Publishers (1973)
Gerber, C: Self-Adaption and Scalability in Multi-Agent Societies (PhD thesis). Universitat des Saarlandes (1999)
De Greene, K.B.:, The Adaptive Organization, anticipation and management of crisis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1982)
Huhns, M., Mukhopadhy, U., Stephens, L.M., Bonnel, R.D.: DAI for Document Retrieval: The MINDS Project. Chapter 9 of Distributed AI Volume II, Pitman Publishing Ltd (1987)
Ishida, T., Yokoo, M., Gasser, L.: An Organizational Approach to Adaptive Productive Systems. Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1990) 52–58
Kuokka, D., Harada, L.: Matchmaking for Information Agents. Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (1995) 672–678
Lee, L.C., Nwana, H.S., Ndumu, D.T., De Wilde, P.: The stability, scalability and performance of multi-agent systems. British Telecom Technology Journal 16(3) (1998) 94–103
Rana, O.F., Stout, K.: What is Scalability in Multi-Agent Systems?. Fourth Annual International Conference on Autonomous Agents (2000)
Shehory, O.: A Scalable Agent Location Mechanism. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Agents VI (2000) 162–172
Shoham, Y.: AGENT0: A Simple Agent Language and Its Interpreter. Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2 (1991) 704–709
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Turner, P.J., Jennings, N.R. (2001). Improving the Scalability of Multi-agent Systems. In: Wagner, T., Rana, O.F. (eds) Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems. AGENTS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1887. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47772-1_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47772-1_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42315-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47772-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive