# Designing Multi-Agent System Organisations for Flexible Runtime Behaviour
## 5 Results  
Agent performance was measured in terms of time and the number of rooms entered. The best performance was observed when the agents were provided the full features of the OJazzIC meta-model, implementing policies for sharing intentions and beliefs regarding rescues to be completed and the successful completion of rescues. Figure 6 provides a summary of a number of 4-room simulation runs involving coordination of a stretcher rescue with the policies in Table 5. This plots time vs. level of organisation support vs. number of rooms entered. Green results are for simulation runs involving three medic agents; blue results are for simulation runs involving four medic agents. The data illustrates that the agents with no organisation awareness were not as successful as those with organisation support. The successful runs occurred with Org index level 2 and up. These successful simulations involved organisations in which agents were communicating. The time taken to complete all rescues was similar across these simulations. Generally small time improvements were observed as more beliefs were shared within the organisation. The highest level of organisational support in this group of simulations was for Org index 4 and 5. Org index 5 simulations had better performance overall regarding the number of rooms entered during the simulation. Exploring the policies in Table 6 provides an opportunity to investigate more closely the social policies for improvisation within an organisation to scrutinise whether the trade off between the extra overhead of communication driven by organisational policies is beneficial for improving performance. Figures 7-10 show the number of messages sent, number of rooms entered, time taken, and time spent idle by agents in simulations with these configurations. Observations of agents' behaviour during the simulations show that performance is more efficient in the achievement of the objectives when agents belong to an organisation and have the support of organisational policies to ensure coordination of beliefs and intentions. When a handover to an officer to carry a stretcher was permitted in response to a situation wherein a medic agent suddenly became unavailable and could not fulfil a previously created SharedPlan, performance improvements were observed. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c p{341.4 pt}} \hline \hline
**Org Index** & **Policy: Full Organisation Support, with Agents Sharing Beliefs and Rescue Completion Plus** \\ \hline
6 & no additional policies \\
7 & handover policy allows medic to delegate if an officer is nearby \\
8 & handover policy allows medic to delegate stretcher carrying, if any officer is available, the officer then remains unavailable for any further rescues; share rescue intentions with all others in the organisation \\
9 & the stretcher handover policy allows handover by a medic only in response to a busy message sent by the original stretcher-carrying partner, full sharing of beliefs and intentions \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: Organisation handover policy settings—12-room simulations. Figure 6: Agent performance in 4-room search and rescue. The results at Org index 7 and 8 indicate that there is a time and communication cost involved in enabling agents the flexible runtime behaviour of handover when compared to organisational agents who do not handover. However the overall performance in terms of time was improved with the introduction of policies that allowed agents to adapt to the situation at runtime. When agents are informed of the rescue intentions of others, they can respond to adjust their own intentions. This improves time and number of rooms entered; however, it does increase the number of messages sent. The ability to adjust social policies at design time to enable agents at runtime to adapt is a trade-off between improved performance and the relative cost of activities such as entering a room and sending a message. Additionally, the effort required at design time must be considered.