Organizational intelligence and negotiation based DAI systems: Theoretical foundations and experimental results

A steadily increasing number of researchers believes that so-called organizational multi agent systems are a key technology to support information and knowledge processing activities in cooperative, networked organizations. This, in turn, necessitates their integration with the underlying human-centred organization. The concept of an organization has emerged as central to the structuring of activities of both decentralized industrial and commercial conglomerates and collections of intelligent problem solvers within Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems. Of late a new discipline has begun to emerge, that of Organizational Intelligence (OI). Organizational Intelligence demands a greater synthesis between the principles of Organization Theory (OT) and DAI, by the explicit incorporation of theories of both organizations and DAI into the field of OI. This paper concentrates on two rather important features of OI, namely organizational memory and learning capabilities. It will first discuss the theoretical foundations. Then it will be shown how the contract net approach can be extended to meet these demands. Finally, it will be proved by some experimental results that the increased intellectual capabilities of the extended contract net will substantially contribute to the performance as well as the quality of solution processes.