Evolutionary adaptation in autonomous agent systems - a paradigm for the emerging enterprise

The enterprise of the future needs to be flexible, adaptive, and to respond rapidly to market demands and opportunities. This in turn, demands a flexi ble, adaptive infrastructure. A plausible way to achieve such and infrastru cture is to base its organisation on autonomous agents, where each agent re sponds locally to the intra- and extra-organisational forces it experiences . Enterprise adaptation then arises as an emergent effect. The theories of Holland, and related work on complex adaptive systems, have a direct bearin g on the emergence of system adaptation from the interaction of locally ada ptive entities. This paper ties Holland's theory of artificial and natural adaptive systems to autonomous agent systems. To illustrate the use of thes e theories in this context, the paper presents a system of evolving autonom ous agents, interacting in a simulated producer/consumer economic world. Th e paper presents preliminary results with the producer/consumer, evolving a gents system, and discusses the implications of these results for evolving, adaptive enterprise infrastructure systems.