A Critical Analysis of the Effects of Organization on Performance and
Robustness of Multiagent Systems
Michael Schillo
German Research Center for AI (DFKI)
Friday, 31st May 2002
0930 - 1100
RMIT University Function Room (near Kaleide Theatre)
Building 8, level 2, RMIT
Swanston Street, Melbourne.
Abstract:
In task-assignment multiagent systems we assume agents to engage in
interaction with other agents to distribute tasks according to costs,
competency, maybe even task load. As a consequence, a complicated web
of external commitments between the agents and a number of
commitments internal to the agents are created. Although we can expect
rational agents to only make new commitments as long as they fit in
with previous ones, we have to face the fact that in dynamic
environments agents can fail (due to loss of communication, failure
of computing devices etc.). Such failure will leave other agents with
an important problem: they may have committed to other agents to do a
task which they assigned to a failling agent. In this case we have to
provide mechanisms to deal with the possibility that the agent cannot
do the task, as this would cause an internal resource conflict. Not
doing the task will result in an external commitment conflict with
the agent which issued the task.
We deal with this interesting aspect of multiagent robustness, by
showing how different organizational forms can help to reassign tasks
under these circumstances. By using several performance measures, we
discuss their advantages and disadvantages for this kind of conflict
resolution.
Biosketch:
Michael Schillo received an MSc in natural language processing from
the University of Leeds, UK and holds a Diploma in informatics from
Saarland University, Germany. He is currently affiliated with the
German Research Center for AI (DFKI), where he is pursueing a PhD on
robustness in multiagent systems.