Patent ID: 7624167

Claim:
A method for determining the assignment of a plurality of agents, the method comprising: identifying sets of agents of the plurality of agents, the plurality of agents and monitoring devices contained in a distributed system; associating at least one monitoring device of the monitoring devices in the distributed system with the identified set of agents, where each agent in a set of the sets of agents includes at least one common association; wherein the distributed system is arranged into a plurality of groups, each group associated with a manager; assigning the set of agents to at least one manager; and iteratively improving the assignment of each agent of the sets of agents to the managers until at least one desired assignment criterion is achieved, wherein the at least one criterion corresponds a to a measure of the managers ability to efficiently manage the agents; wherein the iteratively improving assignments involves testing for possible reassignments of the set of agents to the managers, calculating a gain for each possible reassignment, based on the gain for each possible assignment calculating a maximum cumulative gain, and reassigning the set of agents that contributed to the maximum cumulative gain; wherein the at least one desired assignment criterion is achieved when the maximum cumulative gain is not greater than zero and the at least one desired criterion is not violated.