Organizational intelligence and negotiation based DAI systems – theoretical foundations and experimental results

A steadily increasing number of researchers believes that so-called ’organizational’ multi agent systems are a key technology to support information and knowledge processing activities in cooperative, networked organizations. This, in turn, necessitates their integration with the underlying human-centred organization.The concept of an ’organization’ has emerged as central to the structuring of activities of both decentralized industrial and commercial conglomerates and collections of intelligent problem solvers within Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems. Of late a new discipline has begun to emerge, that of Organizational Intelligence (OI). Organizational Intelligence demands a greater synthesis between the principles of Organization Theory (OT) and DAI, by the explicit incorporation of theories of both organizations and DAI into the field of OI. This paper concentrates on two rather important features of OI, namely organizational memory and learning capabilities. It will first discuss the theoretical foundations. Then it will be shown how the contract net approach can be extended to meet these demands. Finally, it will be proved by some experimental results that the increased "intellectual" capabilities of the extended contract net will substantially contribute to the performance as well as the quality of solution processes.<br/

Semantics-based locking:from isolation to cooperation

'Advanced database applications', such as CAD/CAM, CASE, large AI applications or imageand voice processing, place demands on transaction management which differ substantially from those of traditional database applications. In particular, there is a need to support 'enriched' data models (which include, for example, complex objects or version and configuration management), 'synergistic' cooperative work, and application- or user-supported consistency. This paper deals with a subset of these problems. It develops a methodology for implementing semantics-based concurrency control on the basis of ordinary locking. More specifically, it will be shown how conventional locking can step by step be improved and refined to finally reach our initial goal, namely a comprehensive support of synergistic cooperative work by the exploitation of application-specific semantics. In addition to the 'conventional' binding of locks to transactions we consider the binding of locks to objects (object related) and subjects (subject related locks). Object related locks can define persistent and adaptable access restrictions on objects. This permits, among others, the modeling of different types of version models (time versions, version graphs) as well as library (standard) objects. Subject related locks are bound to subjects (user, application, etc.) and can be used among others to supervise or direct the transfer of objects between transactions.<br/

Zur Verbundintelligenz integrierter Mensch-Computer-Teams:ein organisationstheoretischer Ansatz

Der Beitrag führt zunächst in neuere organisationstheoretische Arbeiten zur "Organisatorischen Intelligenz" ein. Diese setzen u.a. voraus, kognitive menschliche und maschinelle Arbeit durch entsprechenden Einsatz informationstechnischer Maßnahmen organisatorisch zu integrieren. Die Berücksichtigung aktueller Anforderungen an die Führungsorganisation (Dezentralisierung und Delegation, Kooperation statt zentraler Vorgaben, Erweiterung der Bereichsautonomie) führt zu dem auf den Kooperationsparadigmen der Informatik basierenden Vorschlag einer föderativen Informationssystemarchitektur. Diese enthält als einen wesentlichen Bestandteil ein wissensbasiertes Koordinationsmanagement, welches die Arbeit integrierter Mensch-Computer-Teams wirkungsvoll unterstützt und das Verhalten kooperativ-intelligenter Informationssysteme an den Zielen der Organisatorischen Intelligenz auszurichten erlaubt

Controlling cooperation and recovery in nested transactions

Recovery is a hard problem in environments where transactions perform work in a cooperative style (e.g., design environments). We propose concepts to control cooperation and recovery within nested transaction hierarchies. By allowing different nodes to run different protocols, we can build so-called recovery spheres with well-defined properties. We characterize those properties and illustrate them by examples from design environments.<br/

Multi-agent systems and their role in future energy grids

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14181 “Multi-agent systems and their role in future energy grids”. A number of recent events (e. g. Fukushima, Japan, and the largest blackout in history, India) have once again increased global attention on climate change and resource depletion. The evaluation of the feasibility of current approaches for future energy generation, distribution, transportation, and consumption has become an important requirement for most countries. There is a general consensus on the need for a fundamental transformation of future energy grids. The development of an information and communication technology (ICT) support infrastructure was identified as the key challenge in the design of an end-to-end smart grid. A multiagent system, with agents located at th