Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Hierarchies
Holarchies
Coalitions
Team
Societies
Federations
Markets
Matrix
Figure 3.9
Organizational styles (adapted from Horling and Lesser 2005)
10.1
Hierarchies
In a hierarchical model, the agents are arranged in a treelike structure, where
direction of action comes to the leaf agents from higher-level agents that have
a broader view of the system. Leaf agents collect and provide information for
higher-level agents, and horizontal communication is usually not allowed. The
strength of the hierarchical style is that parallelism is easy to achieve, and the
communication flow is rather limited. The centralized characteristics of the deci-
sional nodes also make it vulnerable for single-point-of-failures.
10.2
Holarchies
Holarchies are based on the structural concept of encapsulation known from
the object-oriented paradigm, so almost any entity can be regarded as part of
something bigger that can act as a whole. For example, a wheel is a whole
by itself, but can also just be regarded as part of a car, and when we deal
with the car, it will indirectly affect the wheel. Holarchies can be appropriate to
model structural decompositions with autonomy. For manufacturing and material
handling it could be different areas of system, which have different responsibility
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