Designing tree-structured organizations for computational agents

Abstract

We describe a framework for defining the space of organization designs for computational agents, use our framework for analyzing the expected performance of a class of organizations, and describe how our analyses can be applied to predict performance for a distributed information gathering task. Our analysis specifically addresses the impact of the span of control (branching factor) in tree-structured hierarchical organizations on the response time of such organizations. We show quantitatively how the overall task size and granularity influence the design of the span of control for the organization, and that within the class of organizations considered the apropriate span of control is confined to a relatively narrow range. The performance predicted by our overall model correlates with the actual performance of a distributed organization for computer network monitoring. Consequently, we argue that our framework can support aspects of organizational self-design for computational agents, and might supply insights into the design of human organizations as well.