Distribution of Roles in Virtual Organization of Agents

Abstract

Agent-based virtual organizations have acquired growing relevance during the last years. While these systems can be used to model human societies, there are still some open issues to be solved when working with agent-based virtual organizations, including conflict resolution. In a virtual organization it is possible to find different conflictive situations among which is the task of assigning roles to the agents in the organization. The number of agents can vary dynamically in an organization, which has produced the need to define automatic self-adaptive mechanisms for role assignment. This paper presents an innovative linear programming mechanism for role assignment in virtual organizations of agents. With the use of linear programming it is possible to determine the roles that will be assigned to each agent based on the agent’s specific capabilities. The proposed mechanism was tested in a case study in geriatric residences and the results obtained are presented in this paper.