Multi-dimensional adaptation in MAS organizations

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Organization adaptation requires determining the consequences of applying changes not only in terms of the benefits provided but also measuring the adaptation costs as well as the impact that these changes have on all of the components of the organization. In this paper, we provide an approach for adaptation in multiagent systems based on a multidimensional transition deliberation mechanism (MTDM). This approach considers transitions in multiple dimensions and is aimed at obtaining the adaptation with the highest potential for improvement in utility based on the costs of adaptation. The approach provides an accurate measurement of the impact of the adaptation since it determines the organization that is to be transitioned to as well as the changes required to carry out this transition. We show an example of adaptation in a service provider network environment in order to demonstrate that the measurement of the adaptation consequences taken by the MTDM improves the organization performance more than the other approaches.Manuscript received January 2, 2012; revised July 26, 2012; accepted August 7, 2012. Date of publication August 31, 2012; date of current version April 16, 2013. This work was supported in part by projects TIN2008-04446 and TIN2009-13839-C03-01. J. M. Alberola received a Grant from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion de Espana (AP2007-00289). This paper was recommended by Associate Editor J. Huang.Alberola Oltra, JM.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; García-Fornes, A. (2013). Multi-dimensional adaptation in MAS organizations. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics. 43(2):622-633. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCB.2012.2213592S62263343

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