Description of the Conference Management System Scenario used in this Gaia Organizational Structure Example
Let us consider an agent-based system for supporting the process of producing the technical program for an international conference. The process may be subdivided into three phases:
- The submission phase: the program committee chair (PC Chair) and the organizer distribute the call for papers. The authors submit their papers. The papers are classified (according to specific criteria), a submission number is assigned to each paper and the authors are notified about that.
- The review phase: the PC Chair distributes the papers among the PC Members which are in charge of providing reviews for those papers. The PC Chair collects back reviews, decides upon the acceptance/rejection of papers, and eventually notifies authors of the decision. Considering all the accepted papers, the PC Chair prepares the conference program.
- The publishing phase: the authors of the accepted papers have to produce a revised version of their papers. The publisher has to collect these final versions and compose the proceedings.
The process clearly involves three loosely interacting phases, each involving different actors, and naturally leads to conceiving one MAS for supporting the activities of each phases. There, personal agents will be naturally associated to the actors involved in the process (authors, PC Chair, PC Members, reviewers) to support their work. It is also natural that the roles played by each agent reflect the ones played by the associated actor in the conference organization. This may require agents to interact both directly with each other (according to patterns that will reflect the patterns of interactions in the real-world organizations), and indirectly (via exchanges of papers and review forms).
Organizational Structure
The organizational structure is the aspect of the system that is more likely to be affected by the conference size. Let us firstly assume that the conference organizers expect a limited number of submissions, and then decide to organize the review process around a simple hierarchy (see fig 1 in the attached file).
The PC Chair plays the ReviewCatcher role and distributes the papers among the PC Members, which simply acts playing the role of Reviewers. The PC-Members, eventually send back reviews to the PC Chair, which thus plays also the ReviewCollector role. Based on this, the preliminary roles identified in the analysis already suffice, and they can be simply organized (via properly completing the
interactions model) into a hierarchy.
Adoption of a Different Organizational Structure
Let us assume that the number of submissions is much higher than expected. At this point, the conference organizers may decide to adopt a different structure, i.e., a multilevel hierarchy, implying some change also in the underlying MAS supporting the process. The multilevel hierarchy could be organized as follows. The PC Chair will have to play a new – previously not identified – role of ReviewPartitioner , to partition papers “by areas” and distribute each partition to specifically appointed Vice Chairs, each in charge of handling papers in his/her area of competence. These Vice Chairs than have to act as ReviewCatcher for their assigned partitions, recruiting PC Members as Reviewers. Vice Chairs also play as ReviewCollector for their partition,
and the same do the PC Chair for the whole set of reviews. Now, what should a designer do if forced to switch from the “small conference” design to the “large conference” design? Well, the designer can re-use all previously identified models, re-applying them in the sub-hierarchies of Vice Chairs and PC Members, and introducing the new role of “ReviewPartitioner” to define the upper level of the hierarchy (see fig.2 in the attached file).
source: Reference of Dealing with Adaptive Multi-agent Organizations in the Gaia Methodology.
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