Decentralised Structural Adaptation in Agent Organisations

Abstract. Autonomic computing is being advocated as a tool for maintaining and managing large, complex computing systems. Self-organising multi-agent systems provide a suitable paradigm for developing such autonomic systems. Towards this goal, we demonstrate a robust, decentralised approach for structural adaptation in explicitly modelled problem solving agent organisations. Our method is based on self-organisation principles and enables the agents to modify the organisational structure to achieve a better allocation of tasks across the organisation in a simulated task-solving environment. The agents forge and dissolve relations with other agents using their history of interactions as guidance. We empirically show that the efficiency of organisations using our approach is close to that of organisations having an omniscient central allocator and considerably better than static organisations or those changing the structure randomly.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Ramachandra Kota, Nicholas Gibbins, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Complex Computing Systems, Intelligent Agents, Organisations, Self-organising Multi-agent Systems