Autonomy Comes at a Price: Performance and Robustness of Multiagent Organizations

Abstract

Market-based approaches have a good tradition for supporting the development of task-assignment multiagent systems. Such systems consist of customer agents that have jobs to assign, and provider agents that have the resources to perform the jobs. Jobs can be complex, requiring the collaboration of several provider agents. We present a set of sociological forms of collaboration between firms that have the potential to increase performance through the structure they impose. This gain of structure, which comes with a loss of autonomy, is especially valuable in settings where communication is limited, which is an appropriate assumption in large-scale applications. We empirically evaluate these organizational forms according to the amount of communication required and the rate of failed task-assignments. Furthermore, we investigate the behaviour of each form in the face of agents dropping out during runtime and compare them to settings without organizational forms.