Many researchers have shown that there is no single best organization or coordination mechanism for all environments. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an extendable family of coordination mechanisms, called Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP). The set of coordination mechanisms described here assists in scheduling activities for teams of cooperative computational agents. The GPGP approach has several unique features. First, it is not tied to a single domain. Each mechanism is defined as a response to certain features in the current task environment. We show that different combinations of mechanisms are appropriate for different task environments. Secondly, the approach works in conjunction with an agent's existing local planner/scheduler. Finally, the initial set of five mechanisms presented here generalizes and extends the Partial Global Planning (PGP) algorithm. In comparison to PGP, GPGP allows more agent heterogeneity, it exchanges less global ...

Coordination, as the act of managing interdependencies between activities, is one of the central research issues in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Many researchers have shown that there is no single best organization or coordination mechanism for all environments. Problems in coordinating the activities of distributed intelligent agents appear in many domains: the control of distributed sensor networks; multi-agent scheduling of people and/or machines; distributed diagnosis of errors in local-area or telephone networks; concurrent engineering; `software agents' for information gathering. The design of coordination mechanisms for group...

This paper shows how the distributions of objective parameters such as "the number of VLM methods seen by the maximally loaded agent" (

viewpoints. It is a tool for building and testing computational theories of coordination. TÆMS is compatible with both formal computational agent-centered approaches and experimental approaches. The framework allows us to both mathematically analyze (when possible) and quantitatively simulate the behavior of multi-agent systems with respect to interesting characteristics of the computational task environments of which they are part. We believe that it provides the correct level of abstraction for meaningfully evaluating centralized, parallel, and distributed control algorithms, negotiation strategies, and organizational designs. This chapter will briefly describe the TÆMS modeling framework for representing abstract task environments, concentrating particularly on its support for simulation. I will describe how to model each of several different multi-agent problem-solving environments, such as This work was supported by DARPA contract N0

This article argues that a DAI approach can be used to cope with the complexity of industrial applications. DAI techniques are beginning to have a broad impact; the current introduction of these techniques by an ESPRIT project, a Palo Alto consortium, ARPA, Carnegie Mellon University, MCC, and others are good examples. In the near future, other industrial products will emerge from the application of DAI techniques to other domains, including distributed databases, computer-supported cooperative work, and air traffic control. An important advantage of a DAI approach is the ability to integrate existing standalone knowledge-based systems. This factor is important because software for industrial applications is often developed in an ad hoc fashion. Thus, organizations possess a large number of standalone systems developed at different times by different people using different techniques. These systems all operate in the same physical environment, all have expertise that is related but distinct, and all could benefit from cooperation with other such standalone systems

In many application areas (such as concurrent engineering, software development, hospital scheduling, manufacturing scheduling, and military planning), individuals are responsible for an agenda of tasks and face choices about the best way to locally handle each task, in what order to do tasks, and when to do them. Such decisions are often hard to make because of coordination problems: individual tasks are related to the tasks of others in complex ways, and there are many sources of uncertainty (no one has a complete view of the task structure at arbitrary levels of detail, the situation may be changing dynamically, and no one is entirely sure of the outcomes of all of their actions). The focus of this paper is the development of support tools for distributed, cooperative work by groups (collaborative teams) of human and computational agents. We will discuss the design of a set of distributed autonomous computer programs ("agents") that assist people in coordinating their activities by ...

Coordination is a crucial behavior in cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS). Analyzing coordination requires an understanding of the interplay between the agents, their problem, and their environment. The core behaviors of distributed coordination in CDPS systems are the coherent specification and scheduling of tasks over the set of distributed agents working on sets of interrelated problems. The complexity of, and uncertainty about, the problem interrelationships make distributed task coordination difficult. This paper describes a causal model of this process that links the interrelationships, called coordination relationships, to the local scheduling constraints of distributed agents. Besides coordination relationships, environmental uncertainty and the lack of infinite computational resources also make distributed coordination difficult. It is not only the presence or absence of a coordination relationship that is important, but its quantitative properties: how likely is ...

In recent years interorganizational communication and coordination have relied increasingly on the exchange of EDIFACT-messages. Unfortunately, coordination protocols based on EDIFACT are typically complex. As a consequence, coordination by EDIFACT requires a close coupling and a huge amount of messages to be profitable. In the logistics sector Tracking and Tracing based on EDIFACT led to inflexible alliances between sender and (few) forwarders. Furthermore, many `unnecessary ' messages are produced when taking into account that only a very small number of shipments face problems leading to a delay in delivery. In addition, many forwarders already allow their customers to request status information via WWW. In cooperation with a large company sending more than 10 million shipments per year, an agent based system for Tracking and Tracing called `ECTL-Monitor' (Electronic Commerce Transport Logistics) was developed in order to replace the principle of pushing information by a more flex...

. In many application areas individuals are responsible for an agenda of tasks and face choices about the best way to locally handle each task, in what order to do tasks, and when to do them. Such decisions are often hard to make because of coordination problems: individual tasks are related to the tasks of others in complex ways, and there are many sources of uncertainty (no one has a complete view of the task structure at arbitrary levels of detail, the situation may be changing dynamically, and no one is entirely sure of the outcomes of all of their actions). The focus of this paper is the development of support tools for distributed, cooperative work by groups (collaborative teams) of human and computational agents. We will discuss the design of a set of distributed autonomous computer programs ("agents") that assist people in coordinating their activities by helping them to manage their agendas. We describe several ongoing implementations of these ideas including 1) simulated agen...

Due to recent market challenges organizational researchers have developed a variety of strategies how organizations can continuously survive in highly dynamic, sometimes even hostile environments. One of the most important strategies aims to enhance the flexibility of enterprises through widespread decentralization, while another well-known approach advocates customer orientation through systematic business process (re-) engineering. This paper addresses organizational flexibility and business process orientation from the perspective of information systems. It starts from a requirements analysis which investigates the challenges of contemporary organizational strategies and then proceeds towards an approach that supports the flexible modeling of business processes by linking decentralized organizational procedures. For this purpose a set of process modeling and process interaction operators is defined. These operators also allow to automatically create and customize configurations of c...