  A large number of real and abstract systems involve the transformation of
some basic resource into respective products under the action of multiple
processing agents, which can be understood as multiple-agent production systems
(MAP). At each discrete time instant, for each agent, a fraction of the
resources is assumed to be kept, forwarded to other agents, or converted into
work with some efficiency. The present work describes a systematic study of
nine basic MAP architectures subdivided into two main groups, namely parallel
and sequential distribution of resources from a single respective source.
Several types of interconnections among the involved processing agents are also
considered. The resulting MAP architectures are studied in terms of the total
amount of work, the dispersion of the resources (states) among the agents, and
the transition times from the start of operation until the respective steady
state. Several interesting results are obtained and discussed, including the
observation that some of the parallel designs were able to yield maximum work
and minimum state dispersion, achieved at the expense of the transition time
and use of several interconnections between the source and the agents. The
results obtained for the sequential designs indicate that relatively high
performance can be obtained for some specific cases.

Multiagent Systems