Organization self-design of distributed production systems

The authors introduce two reorganization primitives, composition and decomposition, which change the population of agents and the distribution of knowledge in an organization. To create these primitives, they formalize organizational knowledge, which represents knowledge of potential and necessary interactions among agents in an organization. The authors develop computational organizational self-design (OSD) techniques for agents with architectures based on production systems to take advantage of the well-understood body of theory and practice. They first extend parallel production systems, where global control exists, into distributed production systems, where problems are solved by a society of agents using distributed control. Then they introduce OSD into distributed production systems to provide adaptive work allocation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in adapting to changing environmental demands. The approach affects production system design and improves the ability of build production systems that can adapt to changing real-time constraints