The centerpiece of this project is the design, development, and evaluation of computational representations and algorithms for making software agents that are organizationally adept. An organizationally-adept agent is not only aware of its role(s) in an organization, but can also monitor how well it is fulfilling its organizational responsibilities and can proactively adapt its behaviors to meet organizational needs better. Organizationally adept agents evaluate their behaviors based not on their (agent-centric) self-interests but rather on their (organization-centric) responsibilities to each other, and autonomously adapt to achieve organizational objectives emergently.
Elaboration and adaptation by organizationally adept agents means that the ultimate organization design is formed by a combination of top-down design (to produce a "ballpark" organization) and emergent refinement processes. Further, this combination can be iterative and ongoing, where organizationally adept agents can detect tension between top-down and emergent influences, and inform the design processes of runtime interaction patterns and environmental tendencies that suggest useful top-down organization restructurings.
The intellectual problems being pursued are central to practical issues in scaling multi-agent systems to help solve complex, long-term, global problems. Many critical challenges facing society including climate change, health care, and sustainable energy|require a prolonged commitment to monitoring and managing distributed activities. Networked computer systems populated by software agents, which can be constantly measuring, comparing, and interpreting information to understand and respond to wide-scale phenomena, promise to address such challenges, but need the kinds of innovations proposed in this project. Second, while the project is specifically looking at organizations for computational agents, our results will inform, and be informed by, research on human organizations. To stimulate sharing insights and results, the investigators will organize a multi-disciplinary symposium on organization-centric reasoning, and will train an inter-disciplinary cohort of graduate students.
