Incorporating Organizational Design Principles and Experiences into the Design and Implementation of Multi Agent Systems

Abstract

The concept of an “organization” has emerged as central to the structuring of activities of both decentralized industrial and commercial conglomerates and collections of intelligent problem solvers within Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems (Gasser 1992). Industrial and commercial organizations, require adequate support from information systems architectures in order they may exhibit cooperative problem solving capabilities. There exists a need in industrial and business applications to intelligently integrate data, information and knowledge from a diverse range of sources, particularly during product design, or policy formation. In order to achieve effective and informed decision making, the expertise of many agents, both computational and human, needs to be combined and coordinated. Highly organized DAI systems are critical in human problem solving environments (Gasser 1992). Organizations of the future demand new technologies and techniques (Gasser 1992, Papazoglou et al. 1992).