CAREER: Coordination: Intergrating Organizational Style with Environmental Characteristics

该奖项通过研究各种组织风格与不同问题领域的环境特征的相互作用来支持协调理论的发展。 组织风格可以作为一套协调机制来操作，这些机制将某些行为作为风格的一部分来执行。 然而，并不是所有的协调行为都来自抽象的组织风格，很多都来自对特定环境（问题域）特征的标准反应。 本研究旨在扩展环境和组织模型，代表常见的环境问题的标准反应，并制定组织风格的操作规范。 这使得环境约束和组织风格之间的相互作用可以通过分析来推理。 设计师并不是注定要用几个简单的组织行为和大量脆弱的特定于领域的协调策略来创建协调系统。 相反，给定良好的环境模型和某些其他约束（通常由现有的人类组织决定），设计者可以对计算组织和标准环境影响的协调行为做出原则性的选择。 这个项目将导致一个更丰富的工具集，用于构建和分析多智能体计算机系统，并将这些系统与现有的人类组织集成在分布式信息收集，分布式调度和并行工程等应用程序中。 http://www.cis.udel.edu/~decker/research/organizations.html

This award supports the development of a theory of coordination by means of examining the interactions of various organizational styles with the environmental characteristics of different problem domains. Organizational styles can be operationalized as sets of coordination mechanisms that enforce certain behaviors as part of the style. However, not all coordination behavior arises from abstract organizational styles; much arises from standard responses to specific environmental (problem domain) characteristics. This research aims to extend environment and organization models, represent standard responses to common environmental problems, and develop operational specifications for organizational styles. This allows the interactions between environmental constraints and organizational styles to be reasoned about analytically. Designers are not doomed to create coordinated systems with only a few simple organizational behaviors and large numbers of brittle domain-specific coordination heuristics. Instead, given good environment models and certain other constraints (often dictated by existing human organizations), desiginers can make principled choices of computational organizations and standard environment-influenced coordination behaviors. This project will result in a much richer set of tools for building and analyzing both multi-agent computer systems and integrating such systems with existing human organizations in applications such as distributed information gathering, distributed scheduling, and concurrent engineering. http://www.cis.udel.edu/~decker/research/organizations.html