Organisational adaptation of multi-agent systems in a peer-to-peer scenario

Abstract

Organisations in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have proven to be successful in regulating agent societies. Nevertheless, changes in agents' behaviour or in the dynamics of the environment may lead to a poor fullment of the system's purposes, and so the entire organisation needs to be adapted. In this paper we focus on endowing the organisation with adaptation capabilities, instead of expecting agents to be capable of adapting the organisation by

Challenges for adaptation in agent societies

“…However, similar to the AEI approach, the 2-LAMA approach in (Campos et al, 2011) presents an example in which assistants use case-based reasoning for proposing Table 5. Adaptation phases in 2-LAMA…”

“…The Two Level Assisted MAS Architecture (2-LAMA) (Campos et al, 2009;Campos et al, 2011) (Table 5) is another approach that provides support for adaptation. This approach was first based on the AEI approach and then was extended to fit a more general model of organization.…”

“…Several criteria are used to select the specific changes in the 2-LAMA approach. As an example, in (Campos et al, 2011), assistant agents integrate two different methods based on heuristics and case-based reasoning. This approach considers adaptation costs (in time and/or resources) that should be taken into account in order to decide the adaptation frequency.…”

“…Therefore, changes are introduced with the aim of inducing greater accomplishment of the current goals regardless of the costs, as long as these take into account the adaptation frequency. As an example, in peer-to-peer scenarios (Campos et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2011), a social structure adaptation is carried out through modifications of relationships between peers with the aim of creating the optimal network composed by the paths with the shortest latencies. However, these modifications could have associated costs that would make it more profitable to adapt to a sub-optimal network that has an associated lower cost to be adapted to.…”

“…In this line, the 2-LAMA approach provides an interesting view of adaptation since several dimensions can considered for adaptation. Even though adaptation in the work of (Campos et al, 2011) is only considered for structural and normative dimensions, the assistance layer provided by this approach would increase the number of dimensions considered for adaptation. However, adaptation in different dimensions should require a greater level of integration.…”