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with their subordinates and superior managers. The operators have no subor-
dinates. The operators tackle and process assigned events. When the operators
cannot process the events due to a lack of skill, they report the events to their
superiors. The managers assign the events to their subordinates when they can
process the events, otherwise the managers report the events to their superiors.
This mechanism represents the typical cooperation within organizations. For
this mechanism, the skills of the worker agents classified as managers equals the
sum of their subordinates' skills to know whether the subordinates can process
the events or not. For example, the skill of a manager is
{
1
,
1
,
1
,
0
}
when the
manager has three subordinates who have
{
0
,
0
,
1
,
0
}
,
{
0
,
1
,
1
,
0
}
,and
{
1
,
0
,
0
,
0
}
skills, respectively.
In each time step, the worker agents select one event that has the highest
t
e
from the assigned events. Then, the worker agents select the appropriate action
for this step from the following:
(a) processing,
(b) reporting, or
(c) assigning.
When there are no events assigned to the worker agents, the worker agents do
not select any actions. Each action is explained in the following paragraphs using
Fig. 2.
(a) Processing.
This action can be selected by only the worker agents classified
as operators. The worker agent selecting this action processes the selected event
when its skill
S
w
satisfies the required skill
S
e
for the event, this means all the
elements of vectors
S
w
,S
e
satisfy the following condition; the
i
th element of
S
w
equals 1 when the
i
th element of
S
e
equals 1. The required workload of the
selected event is reduced by 1. In the example described in Fig. 2(a), the worker
agent whose skill set satisfies the required skill processes the event. As a result,
the required workload of the event is reduced from 3 to 2.
(b) Reporting.
This action can be selected by only the worker agents who can
select neither processing nor assigning actions. The worker agent selecting this
action assigns the selected event to its superior. When there are two or more
superiors, one of them is randomly selected. In the example described in Fig.
2(b), worker agent B reports the event to superior A because the skill set of
worker agent B does not satisfy the required skill for the event. The reported
event is assigned to worker agent A.
(c) Assigning.
This action can be selected by only the worker agents classified
as managers. The worker agent selecting this action assigns the selected event to
its subordinates. The worker agent assigns the events to one of its subordinates
when the subordinate can process the event solely. The worker agent divides
the event into sub-events and assigns sub-events to its subordinates when there
are no subordinates who can process the event solely. The event is divided into
sub-events with the minimal number of worker agents who can process them.
