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Perspectives on Organizations in Multi-agent Systems

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Multi-Agent Systems and Applications (ACAI 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2086))

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and sensitize reader to the variety of perspectives and the fundamental nature of organizations as stable/stabilizing systems and as multi-perspective action systems. Researchers have been explicitly thinking about MAS/DAI organizations and attempting to link formal (human) organization theory with MAS/DAI models for at least twenty years. Despite this, the idea of organizations has been a peripheral theme in MAS/DAI research---primarily a specific coordination technique---not really one of the central intellectual issues of the field. The theory of ‘natural’ organizations has a somewhat longer, more diverse, and more thorough intellectual history than that of organizations in MAS. Beyond recent work in human social and organization theory, some newer research on abstract organizations has been attempting to unify concepts in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computing theory (e.g., the lambda calculus), with those of natural social organizations and multi-agent systems. The landscape for thinking about organizations in MAS is growing quite interesting, and this paper surveys this landscape. It presents and contrasts some conceptions of organization that have emerged and proven useful, and attempts to show how these have been implemented, experimented with, and applied. It also projects some future directions for research on MAS organizations, and gives some thoughts on where the most exciting issues lie.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL, 61820

    Les Gasser

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  1. Les Gasser
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Computer Science Highfield, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Michael Luck

  2. Facultiy of Electr. Engineering, Dept. of Cybernetics Technicka 2, Czech Technical University, 166 27, Prague 6, Czech Republic

    Vladimír Mařík  & Olga Štěpánková  & 

  3. Dept.of Med. Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, University of Vienna, Freyung 6, 1010, Vienna, Austria

    Robert Trappl

  4. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, 1010, Vienna, Austria

    Robert Trappl

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gasser, L. (2001). Perspectives on Organizations in Multi-agent Systems. In: Luck, M., Mařík, V., Štěpánková, O., Trappl, R. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications. ACAI 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2086. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47745-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47745-4_1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47745-7

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