Scalable Enterprise Systems: Emergent Organizational Structures in Multi-Agent Scalable Enterprises

这项拨款为新兴企业模型的开发提供了资金，这些模型捕获了每个决策代理的独立行为，以及代理之间相互作用的影响。建模方法需要几个步骤。首先，将制定一个代表个体参与者特征的方案。这种表述将包括任务信息、组织关系、本地和系统级目标以及环境中可能发生的变化。其次，将代理表示转换为更适合于系统动力学整体研究的状态空间表示。第三，为了纳入各种因素之间的相互作用，问题将被表述为一个相互作用的粒子系统。将使用重整方案将系统缩小到可管理的规模，同时保持适当的准确性。将测试不同级别的聚合，以检查计算复杂性和准确性之间的权衡。最后，建模方法将使用从食品行业的领先公司收集的数据进行验证。这些数据将用于构建代理表示，然后验证基于真实世界观察的性能估计。大规模多智能体模拟将用于经验性地估计给定组织配置的性能，并将结果与分析模型的预测进行比较。如果成功，这项研究的结果将允许对紧急组织的动态和系统的长期性能进行准确的预测。此外，这些模型将为理解导致有效联盟和组织设计的机制提供洞察力。这些模型可以被扩展企业中的决策代理用来估计由不同的局部决策策略导致的企业绩效。

This grant provides funding for the development of models of emergent enterprises that capture the independent behavior of each decision agent involved, as well as the effect of the interactions among agents. The modeling approach entails several steps. First, a representation scheme for the characteristics of individual participants will be developed. This representation will incorporate task information, organizational relationships, local and system level goals and possible changes in the environment. Second, the agent representation will be transformed into a state space representation that is better suited for the overall study of the dynamics of the system. Third, in order to incorporate the interactions between various agents, the problem will be formulated as an interacting particle system. A renormalization scheme will be used to reduce the system to a manageable size while maintaining an adequate level of accuracy. Different levels of aggregation will be tested to examine the tradeoffs between computational complexity and accuracy. Finally, the modeling approach will be validated using data collected from leading companies in the food industry. These data will be used to construct agent representations and then to verify the performance estimates based on real world observations. Large scale multi-agent simulations will be used to empirically estimate the performance of a given organizational configuration and the results will be compared with the predictions of the analytical model. If successful, the results of this research will allow accurate prediction of the dynamics of emergent organizations and the performance of the system in the long run. In addition, these models will provide insight into understanding the mechanisms that result in effective alliances and organizational designs. These models can be used by decision agents in an extended enterprise to estimate the performance of the enterprise resulting from different local decision strategies.