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Abstract : |
The design of organizations or other coordination mechanisms for groups of agents depends in many ways on the agent's task environment. Two of these dependencies are on the structure of the tasks and on the uncertainty in the task structures. The task structure includes the scope of the problems facing the agents, the complexity of the choices facing the agents, and the the particular kinds and patterns of interrelationships that occur between tasks. A few examples of environmental uncertainty include uncertainty in the a priori structure of any particular problem-solving episode, in the actions of other agents, and in the outcomes of an agent's own actions. These dependencies hold regardless of whether the system comprises just people, just computational agents, or a mixture of the two. For example, the presence of both uncertainty and high variance in a task structure can lead a system of agents to perform better by using coordination algorithms that adapt dynamically to each problem-solving episode [8, 9]. Designing coordination mechanisms also depends on non-task characteristics of the environment such as communication costs, and properties of the agents themselves. Representing and reasoning about the task environment must be part of any computational theory of coordination. TMS (Task Analysis, Environment Modeling, and Simulation) was developed as a framework, |
