The Structure of Concern Project compares many theoretical models from many disciplines to the Adizes PAEI model, arguing that they must all be reflecting the same underlying phenomenon. One concern structure model is described below.
Victor R. Lesser (1998) presents a five-component architecture for supporting sophisticated agent coordination strategies. The components are local agent scheduling, multi-agent coordination, organizational design, detection and diagnosis, and on-line learning. Scheduling and coordination are real-time functions (P and I, respectively), and the rest are part of a solutions-modeling and guidance system (A covers detection and diagnosis, and E covers learning and organizational design). Descriptions of the concerns follow:
P – Local Agent Scheduling: Agent manages current priorities and incoming task requests while executing and monitoring the active task to solve a problem.
A – Detection and Diagnosis: Gathers information from the execution and coordination subsystems, uses and updates knowledge of network resources and current goals, alerts system to need for online learning.
E – Learning and Organizational Design: Adjusts the agent’s long term knowledge about goals, problems, tasks, procedures and network resources. Combines current goals with long-term knowledge to design a top-down organizational structure that describes interdependencies with other agents in the network for those goals.
I – Multi-Agent Coordination: Exchanges short-term meta-level information with other agents, updates beliefs about the network, keeps track of commitments to other agents, updates task and client need information.