Engineering Agent Organisations in a Business Environment

Abstract

Abstract. Motivated by demands from the commercial world for software systems that can assist in the reorganisation of processes for the purpose of reducing business complexity, we discuss the benefits and challenges of the multi-agent approach. We concentrate on the engineering aspects of large scale multi-agent systems and begin our exploration by focusing on a real world example from the call centre industry. The critical call routing process seems appropriate and useful in presenting our ideas and provides a good starting point for the development of agent organisations capable of self-management and coordination. The main contributions of this work can be summarised as the demonstration of the value of agent organisational models that do not replicate the typical hierarchical structures observed in human organisations and that a quite basic peer-to-peer structure produces very similar performance indicators to a mature simulator that uses conventional techniques, suggesting further improvements may readily be realized.