• How to adopt the Agent Organisation Design practice

• Horling & Lesser, 2004

• Self-Organisation

• Identify a Suitable Agent Organisation

• Specify Self-Organisation Algorithm

• Impact of Self-Organisation on Testing, Deployment, and Operation

• [Multi-Agent System Architecture]
• [Requirements Model]

Multi-agent systems with many interacting agents require a form of structure or organisation imposed on the population. Sometimes, this structure is permanent, such as a hierarchy that determines the delegation of control and propagation of information, or transient, such as a coalition in which agents interact until a certain common goal is reached. The system designer has to decide which organisations are suitable for the system to reach the stated goals and implement mechanisms that allow the formation of these organisational structures at runtime. If this process is driven from within the system, Self-Organisation is present.

This practice includes tasks, work products, and guidance that support the decision for a suitable system structure and the selection of a suitable self-organisation mechanism. If the system under development requires self-organisation, e.g., to be robust against agent failures or to adapt to a changing environment, these issues will have to be considered timely and thoroughly as the organisational structure and the algorithm to create it can have tremendous impact on the performance of the system. Introducing these concepts also influences the way the system is tested and deployed and has consequences for the operation of the deployed system. These issues are regarded in more detail in Impact of Self-Organisation on Testing, Deployment, and Operation.

The guideline How to adopt the Agent Organisation Design practice gives an overview of the steps necessary to get started and of common pitfalls.

Familiarise yourself with the different forms of agent organisations. Horling & Lesser, 2004 is an excellent starting point an provides a large wealth of references for more in-depth analysis of the different organisation paradigms. The paper also provides hints as to which form of organisation fits to which goals and requirements. To judge which organisation should be used in a given system, the goals have to be analysed and compared to what is achievable with a certain structure. The selection of a fitting paradigm is described in Identify a Suitable Agent Organisation.

If the organisational structure should originate from within the system, a self-organisation algorithm has to be implemented. A thorough search of the literature can uncover a fitting algorithm. It is most likely that it will have to be adapted to the system under construction. These steps are covered in Specify Self-Organisation Algorithm.