The integration of stimulation and knowledge systems: a semiotic perspective

In a time of rapid change of technological possibilities and of internationalization, organizations need to experiment with these new possibilities, and to understand their potential for change and improvement. This potential for change and improvement can only be revealed by organizational thinking, thinking using existing and novel organization concepts. Organizational thinking can be stimulated and supported by formalization of existing theories, in order to analyze their range of expressiveness and logical structure (Gazendam, 1993), as well as by simulation models that show emergent organizational phenomena, especially related to interagent communication and knowledge in organizations

Theories about architecture and performance of multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems are promising as models of organization because they are based on the idea that most work in human organizations is done based on intelligence, communication, cooperation, and massive parallel processing. They offer an alternative for system theories of organization, which are rather abstract of nature and do not pay attention to the agent level. In contrast, classical organization theories offer a rather rich source of inspiration for developing multi-agent models because of their focus on the agent level. This paper studies the plausibility of theoretical choices in the construction of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems have to be plausible from a philosophical, psychological, and organizational point of view. For each of these points of view, alternative theories exist. Philosophically, the organization can be seen from the viewpoints of realism and constructivism. Psychologically, several agent types can be distinguished. A main problem in the construction of psychologically plausible computer agents is the integration of response function systems with representational systems. Organizationally, we study aspects of the architecture of multi-agent systems, namely topology, system function decomposition, coordination and synchronization of agent processes, and distribution of knowledge and language characteristics among agents. For each of these aspects, several theoretical perspectives exist.