CAREER: Integrating Organizational Style with Environmental Characteristics

NSF IRI-9733004 This award supports the development of a theory of coordination by means of examining the interactions of various organizational styles with the environmental characteristics of different problem domains. Organizational styles can be operationalized as sets of coordination mechanisms that enforce certain behaviors as part of the style. However, not all coordination behavior arises from abstract organizational styles; much arises from standard responses to specific environmental (problem domain) characteristics. This research aims to extend environment and organization models, represent standard responses to common environmental problems, and develop operational specifications for organizational styles. This allows the interactions between environmental constraints and organizational styles to be reasoned about analytically. Designers are not doomed to create coordinated systems with only a few simple organizational behaviors and large numbers of brittle domain-specific coordination heuristics. Instead, given good environment models and certain other constraints (often dictated by existing human organizations), desiginers can make principled choices of computational organizations and standard environment-influenced coordination behaviors. This project will result in a much richer set of tools for building and analyzing both multi-agent computer systems and integrating such systems with existing human organizations in applications such as distributed information gathering, distributed scheduling, and concurrent engineering.

Work on this project has not yet started. Here's some pointers to some previous papers in this general area.

Keith S. Decker. Task Environment Centered Simulation. In M. Prietula, K. Carley, and L. Gasser, editors, Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups. AAAI Press/MIT Press, (forthcoming).
Keith Decker and Jinjiang Li. Coordinated Hospital Patient Scheduling. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, Paris, France, July 1998.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. Quantitative modeling of complex environments. International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance, and Management, 2(4):215--234, December 1993. Special issue on ``Mathematical and Computational Models of Organizations: Models and Characteristics of Agent Behavior''. A more complete version is here.
M.V. Nagendra Prasad, Keith Decker, Alan Garvey, and Victor Lesser, Exploring Organizational Designs with TAEMS: A Case Study of Distributed Data Processing. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multi-agent Systems, Kyoto, Japan, December1996.
``Task-Environment Centered Design of Organizations,'' Presented at the Symposium on Distributed Cognition, 1997 Cognitive Science Conference, Stanford University, August 1997.
``Distributed Coordination and Multi-Agent Organizations,'' Presented at the NSF Workshop on Intelligent Agents, Porto Alegre, Brazil, March 1997.
``Applying Organization Theory to the Analysis and Design of Multi-Agent Systems,'' Presented at the NSF Workshop on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, University of Michigan, March 1995.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. Task Environment Centered Design of Organizations. AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Organization Design, Stanford University, March 21-23, 1994. An experimental HTML version is located HERE.