Agent-Driven Representations, Algorithms, and Metrics for Automated Organizational Design.

Abstract

As cooperative multiagent systems (MASs) increase in interconnectivity, complexity, size, and longevity, coordinating the agents' reasoning and behaviors becomes increasingly difficult. One approach to address these issues is to use insights from human organizations to design structures within which the agents can more efficiently reason and interact. Generally speaking, an organization influences each agent such that, by following its respective influences, an agent can make globally-useful local decisions without having to explicitly reason about the complete joint coordination problem. For example, an organizational influence might constrain and/or inform which actions an agent performs. If these influences are well-constructed to be cohesive and correlated across the agents, then each agent is influenced into reasoning about and performing only the actions that are appropriate for its (organizationally-designated) portion of the joint coordination problem. In this dissertation, I develop an agent-driven approach to organizations, wherein the foundation for representing and reasoning about an organization stems from the needs of the agents in the MAS. I create an organizational specification language to express the possible ways in which an organization could influence the agents' decision making processes, and leverage details from those decision processes to establish quantitative, principled metrics for organizational performance based on the expected impact that an organization will have on the agents' reasoning and behaviors. Building upon my agent-driven organizational representations, I identify a strategy for automating the organizational design process~(ODP), wherein my ODP computes a quantitative description of organizational patterns and then searches through those possible patterns to identify an (approximately) optimal set of organizational influences for the MAS. Evaluating my ODP reveals that it can create organizations that both influence the MAS into effective patterns of joint policies and also streamline the agents' decision making in a coordinate manner. Finally, I use my agent-driven approach to identify characteristics of effective abstractions over organizational influences and a heuristic strategy for converging on a good abstraction.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113616/1/jsleight_1.pd