CAREER: Coordination: Intergrating Organizational Style with Environmental Characteristics

该奖项通过审查不同组织风格与不同问题领域的环境特征的相互作用，支持协调理论的发展。组织风格可以作为一组协调机制来运作，这些协调机制将某些行为作为风格的一部分加以实施。然而，并不是所有的协调行为都源于抽象的组织风格；大部分源于对特定环境(问题域)特征的标准反应。本研究旨在扩展环境和组织模型，提出对常见环境问题的标准反应，并制定组织风格的可操作性规范。这使得环境约束和组织风格之间的相互作用能够得到分析上的推理。设计人员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启发式方法来创建协调系统。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规定)，设计者可以原则性地选择计算组织和标准的受环境影响的协调行为。该项目将产生一套更丰富的工具，用于构建和分析多代理计算机系统，并在分布式信息收集、分布式调度和并行工程等应用程序中将这些系统与现有的人类组织集成。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