Adaptive Hierarchical Multi-Agent Organizations

In this chapter, we discuss the design of adaptive hierarchical organizations for multi-agent systems (MAS). Hierarchical organizations have a number of advantages such as their ability to handle complex problems and their scalability to large organizations. By introducing adaptivity in the structure of hierarchical MAS organizations, we enable agents to balance resources in their organization. We will first provide a number of generic principles for the design of hierarchical MAS organizations. We show how these principles are used to design three different hierarchical organizations for a search and rescue task in the RoboCupRescue simulation environment. The first two of these organizations are static, and the third is able to adapt its structure. An empirical study on the performance of these three organizations shows that the dynamic organization performs better than the two static organizations.