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...

. Adaptation in open, multi-agent information gathering systems is important for several reasons. These reasons include the inability to accurately predict future problem-solving workloads, future changes in existing information requests, future failures and additions of agents and data supply resources, and other future task environment characteristic changes that require system reorganization. We have developed a multi-agent distributed system infrastructure, Retsina (REusable Task Structure-based Intelligent Network Agents) that handles adaptation in an open Internet environment. Adaptation occurs both at the individual agent level as well as at the overall agent organization level. The Retsina system has three types of agents. Interface agents interact with the user receiving user specifications and delivering results. They acquire, model, and utilize user preferences to guide system coordination in support of the user's tasks. Task agents help users perform tasks by formulating p...

Organizations enter alliances with each other to access critical resources, but they rely on information from the network of prior alliances to determine with whom to cooperate. These new alliances modify the existing network, prompting an endogenous dynamic between organizational action and network structure that drives the emergence of interorganizational networks. Testing these ideas on alliances formed in three industries over nine years, the authors show that the probability of a new alliance between specific organizations increases with their interdependence, but also with their prior mutual alliances, common third parties, and joint centrality in the alliance network. The differentiation of the emerging network structure, however, mitigates the effect of interdependence and enhances the effect of joint centrality on new alliance formation. 3

There are many formal approaches to specifying how the mental state of an agent entails the particular actions it will perform. These approaches put the agent at the center of analysis. For some questions and purposes, it is more realistic and convenient for the center of analysis to be the task environment, domain, or society of which agents will be a part. This paper presents such a task environment-oriented modeling framework that can work hand-in-hand with more agent-centered approaches. Our approach features careful attention to the quantitative computational interrelationships between tasks, to what information is available (and when) to update an agent's mental state, and to the general structure of the task environment rather than single-instance examples. A task environment model can be used for both analysis and simulation, it avoids the methodological problems of relying solely on single-instance examples, and provides concrete, meaningful characterizations with which to sta...

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

In this paper we propose an extension to the traditional model of bounded rationality and incorporate the extended model into a theory of organizational behavior. We argue that organizations are collections of tasks and intelligent agents engaged in performing those tasks, both situated within an organizational setting. Organizational behavior is an emergent property of such collections and is constrained by the agent, the task, and the situation. We propose that a unified theory of organizational behavior is possible, but only if agents, tasks, and situations are specified at a sufficient level of detail, and only if that specification embodies both the agents' mental models of the task and social-situation and the task and social-situation. Inattention to relevant details of the agent, task, or situation (and their interactions) may produce misleading results. We describe a candidate theory, ACTS theory, that integrates Agents who are Cognitively-restricted, Task-oriented, and Socially-situated in an interlinked set of representational systems. We suggest that the complexity of the theory warrants its realization and testing in a computational form, and that there exist candidate computational theories of cognitive agents and organizational situations. We illustrate the importance of attending to task

Electronic integration - the use of information technology to re-engineer key business processes and business relations, enables new forms of organization that transcend traditional industry and firm boundaries. Indeed the electronic integration strategies alter the fundamental structure of both firms as well as their environments, requiring a shift in the study of organizations from the level of a focal firm to that of the business network. The business network represents the pattern of interdependent relationships between the activities of a given firm and those of other firms in its competitive environment which influence each others' strategies.

The paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization – organization conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership ’ – is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership’. THE PROBLEM The current comprehensive transformation of the political

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 ...