Designing a search and rescue simulation environment for studying the performance of agent organizations

In the study on performance of organizations of Multi-Agent Systems there exists a need to understand the effects of the task-environment and organization of the agents on the performance of Multi-Agent Systems. Current simulation environments often lack sufficient control over the environment and lack the ability to systematically vary a number of task-environment and organizational parameters and measure the effect of these changes on performance. For this purpose we have created the Extended Organization Design model which categorizes and describes aspects of Multi-Agent Systems; their organization, their task-environment, and a set of performance metrics. We show how the Extended Organization Design is used as a basis for a parameterized model of the Search and Rescue domain