WP027: Modeling Organizational Problem Solving in Multiagent Teams

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
Organizations involving human and computer agents are constrained by a variety of factors including: task properties and arrangements; level of technology; knowledge held by, and distributed among, the agents; information and administrative structures; and organizational norms and policies. An important challenge to the scientific community is to develop, validate and apply theories and models to help managers re-engineer their organizations for higher levels of performance. Our research on organizational problem solving aims to develop a computational model of organizations to study interrelationships between individual knowledge, task requirements and organization structures and policies. This paper reports the first step of our research toward a computational organizational model-the i-AGENTS framework, a prototype computer system for modeling organizations of intelligent agents. i-AGENTS is composed of a number of high level concepts: tasks, agents, organization and communication. A task is described in detail by task action, task object and task constraints; an agent is modeled to consist of cognitive attributes and expertise; role-based organizational structure is adopted for describing organizations. From an organizational perspective, i-AGENTS extends traditional information processing models of organization (Galbraith 77) by explicitly addressing the role of agents' knowledge of both the problem domain and the organization in problem solving. When viewed from an engineering perspective, our research is the first step toward an organizational problem solving model that merges organization theory and distributed artificial intelligence and can be used to simulate and analyze organizational behavior of teams in engineering domains at a very specific level of detail.

Description

Type of resource text
Date created February 1994

Creators/Contributors

Author Jin, Yan
Author Levitt, Raymond E.

Subjects

Subject CIFE
Subject Center for Integrated Facility Engineering
Subject Stanford University
Subject Computational Organizational Model
Subject Multi-Agent Teams
Subject Organizational Problem Solving
Genre Technical report

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User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.

Preferred citation

Preferred Citation
Jin, Yan and Levitt, Raymond E.. (1994). WP027: Modeling Organizational Problem Solving in Multiagent Teams. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gy864nr9165

Collection

CIFE Publications

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