Incorporating adaptive interaction property in cooperative agent for emergent process management

Abstract

An adaptive agent interaction strategy is presented. It has been trailed in a system for emergent process management. That system was constructed using generic process agents. Their architecture is a three-layered BDI hybrid architecture. The agent interaction strategy substantially determines the perforniance of a multi-agent system. The interaction strategy described here is derived by observing the way that humans interact in process management applications. Individuals are driven principally by their goals but this is tempered by social interaction attributes such as whether the individuals they are dealing with are “cooperative ”, “friendly ”, “trustworthy”, and so on. The strategy described takes into account sentiments such as a friendship and trust by making estimates of them for each other agent in the system. Using this strategy each agent continually adapts its behavior on the basis of its observations of other agents and a continual revision of these estimates. The experiment using this approach led to high performance of the process management system in the context of the overall operation of the organization. That is, all using the system agreed that they fell “comfortable” with way in which the system operated and that its overall performance was higher than could be expected from a manual system.