A Hybrid Recommendation Approach for Agent Organizational Structures

Abstract

The performance of an organization depends mainly on the performance of actors' coordination. In this paper, we consider coordination through organizational structures (OS) defined by roles and relations between them. The aim of this paper is to recommend performant OS combining Agent-based methodology with graph theory. The performance of an OS can be measured by different criteria such as robustness, flexibility and efficiency. However, the OS of an organization is not stable and could evolve through time in order to adapt to changes and perturbations of the environment. So, OS recommendations should be done not only at design time but also dynamically at run time. In this context, we propose a hybrid approach to recommend in a coherent way performant OS at these two different stages. At design time, from a set of roles and their authorized relationships, we recommend the most performing organizational structure corresponding to a trade-off between robustness, flexibility and efficiency. At run time, based on the monitoring of an organization structure and its evolution, we recommend OS adaptations to improve its performance. This approach has been implemented and evaluated through a crisis management case study where organization performance is of paramount importance.