Self-organising agent communities for autonomic resource management

The autonomic computing paradigm addresses the operational challenges presented by increasingly complex software systems by proposing that they be composed of many autonomous components, each responsible for the run-time reconfiguration of its own dedicated hardware and software components. Consequently, regulation of the whole software system becomes an emergent property of local adaptation and learning carried out by these autonomous system elements. Designing appropriate local adaptation policies for the components of such systems remains a major challenge. This is particularly true where the system’s scale and dynamism compromise the efficiency of a central executive and/or prevent components from pooling information to achieve a shared, accurate evidence base for their negotiations and decisions.In this paper, we investigate how a self-regulatory system response may arise spontaneously from local interactions between autonomic system elements tasked with adaptively consuming/providing computational resources or services when the demand for such resources is continually changing. We demonstrate that system performance is not maximised when all system components are able to freely share information with one another. Rather, maximum efficiency is achieved when individual components have only limited knowledge of their peers. Under these conditions, the system self-organises into appropriate community structures. By maintaining information flow at the level of communities, the system is able to remain stable enough to efficiently satisfy service demand in resource-limited environments, and thus minimise any unnecessary reconfiguration whilst remaining sufficiently adaptive to be able to reconfigure when service demand changes

Strategic argument mapping

Includes bibliographical references (p. 38)

Study to gather evidence on the working conditions of platform workers VT/2018/032 Final Report 13 December 2019

Platform work is a type of work using an online platform to intermediate between platform workers, who provide services, and paying clients. Platform work seems to be growing in size and importance. This study explores platform work in the EU28, Norway and Iceland, with a focus on the challenges it presents to working conditions and social protection, and how countries have responded through top-down (e.g. legislation and case law) and bottom-up actions (e.g. collective agreements, actions by platform workers or platforms). This national mapping is accompanied by a comparative assessment of selected EU legal instruments, mostly in the social area. Each instrument is assessed for personal and material scope to determine how it might impact such challenges. Four broad legal domains with relevance to platform work challenges are examined in stand-alone reflection papers. Together, the national mapping and legal analysis support a gap analysis, which aims to indicate where further action on platform work would be useful, and what form such action might take

Who Decides about Change and Restructuring in Organizations?

We model the determinants of who makes decisions, the principal or an agent, when there are multiple decisions. Decision making takes effort and time; and, once implemented, the expected loss from a particular decision (or project) increases with the length of time since the last decision was made. The model shows delegation is more likely as: (i) controllable uncertainty increases; (ii) uncontrollable uncertainty decreases; (iii) the number of plants in the firm decreases; (iv) the complexity of the decision increases; and (v) the importance of the decision increases. The theoretical predictions are consistent with our novel empirical results on the delegation of major organizational change decisions using workplace data. Our unique data allows us to identify who made a decision to implement a significant change, as well as key internal and external factors highlighted as potentially important in our theory. Empirically, delegation is more likely in organizations that: face a competitive product market; export; have predictable product demand; have a larger workplace; and that have fewer other workplaces in the same organization producing a similar output. We find business strategy is not related to the allocation of decision making authority; delegation, however, is associated with the use of human resource techniques such as the provision of bonuses to employees.decision making authority, decentralization, delegation, competition, exports, uncertainty, principal and agent

Looking for the cure-all? Targets and the EU's New Energy Strategy. CEPS Policy Brief, No. 118, 23 January 2007

[From the Introduction]. On 10 January 2007, the European Commission outlined the European Union’s ‘energy and climate change vision’ based on two principal documents: • Communication on “An energy policy for Europe”, and • Communication on future climate change policy for the period post-2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires, entitled “Limiting global climate change to 2°C: The way ahead for 2020 and beyond”.1 These two documents have been complemented by several other sectoral policy proposals on renewables, the functioning and implementation of the internal market, infrastructure (notably electricity interconnectors) and sustainable coal, nuclear and energy technologies. In its own words, the Communication on “An Energy Policy for Europe” aims at “combating climate change, limiting the EU’s external vulnerability to imported hydrocarbons, and promoting growth and jobs, thereby providing secure and affordable energy to consumers”. Within the European Commission, the most controversial issue has been the nature of long-term targets. While greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets2 and a binding EU target to source 20% of all energy from renewables by 2020 have been relatively uncontroversial from the beginning, the issue of additional sector-specific targets, for example for renewables as a share of electricity generation, and possibly for heating and cooling, transport and for combined heat and power, has been more difficult. The discussion about the need for these additional sectoral targets is likely to continue and come to the fore again in the negotiations in the Energy and Environment Councils in February, to be finally settled in the European Council on 8-9 March 2007