Dynamic Configuration of Agent Organizations

It is useful to impose organizational structure over multiagent coalitions. Hierarchies, for instance, allow for compartmentalization of tasks: if organized correctly, tasks in disjoint subtrees of the hierarchy may be performed in parallel. Given a notion of the way in which a group of agents need to interact, the Dynamic Distributed Multiagent Hierarchy Generation (DynDisMHG) problem is to determine the best hierarchy that might expedite the process of coordination. This paper introduces a distributed algorithm, called Mobed, for both constructing and maintaining organizational agent hierarchies, enabling exploitation of parallelism in distributed problem solving. The algorithm is proved correct and it is shown that individual additions of agents to the hierarchy will run in an amortized linear number of rounds. The hierarchies resulting after perturbations to the agent coalition have constant-bounded edit distance, making Mobed very well suited to highly dynamic problems.

Evan A. Sultanik, Robert N. Lass, William C. Regli