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My dissertation explored the problem of designing efficient and effective organizations for multi-agent systems. Like human organizations, the ability of a multi-agent system to meet its goals depends not just on individual performance, but also on how the participants are connected and interact with one another. Determining the appropriate set of roles that agents should take on, which other agents they communicate with, and the manner in which those interactions take place is part of the organizational design process. The space of possible designs for a system of any significant complexity can be quite large, so finding the optimal, or even a satisfactory design can be a challenging problem. I have developed a quantitative modeling language that can describe this organizational space, along with techniques to explore and adapt the possible designs derived from such models.

My dissertation detailing this research can be found here, and there is a somewhat shorter journal article on the work here.

I currently work at Google, answering your queries as fast as I can.

Research Interests

• Organizational Design and Adaptation
• Agent Architectures
• Agent Control
• Simulation Environments
• Distributed Sensor Networks
• Distributed Systems

Selected Publications*

Horling, Bryan; Lesser, Victor. Using quantitative models to search for appropriate organizational designs. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Volume 16, Number 2, Springer, pp. 95-149. 2008.

Horling, Bryan; Lesser, Victor; Vincent, Regis and Wagner, Thomas. The Soft Real-Time Agent Control Architecture. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Volume 12, Number 1, Springer Science+Business Media , pp. 35-92. 2006. An earlier version is available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 2002-14.

Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. Using ODML to Model Organizations for Multi-Agent Systems. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2005), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 72-80. September 2005.

Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. Analyzing, Modeling and Predicting Organizational Effects in a Distributed Sensor Network. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, Special Issue on Agents Organizations, Volume 11, Number 1, pp. 9-30. July 2005.

Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. A Survey of Multi-Agent Organizational Paradigms. The Knowledge Engineering Review, Volume 19, Number 4, Cambridge University Press, pp. 281-316. 2005. An earlier version is available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 04-45.

Horling, Bryan; and Lesser, Victor. Data Dissemination Techniques For Distributed Simulation Environments. Proceedings of the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference, Ingalls, R. G.; Rossetti, M. D.; Smith, J. S.; and Peters, B. A., ed., Omnipress, pp. 792-800. December 2004.

Horling, Bryan; Mailler, Roger; Shen, Jiaying; Vincent, Regis, and Lesser, Victor. Using Autonomy, Organizational Design and Negotiation in a Distributed Sensor Network. Distributed Sensor Networks: A multiagent perspective, Lesser, Victor; Ortiz, Charles; and Tambe, Milind, ed., Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 139-183. 2003. Book chapter.