Our general interest is in the design of multi-agent (composite) systems. We focus in this paper on the design of joint problem-solving strategies for such systems. In particular, we are interested in a) the creation of agents, b) their assignment of roles and c) their communication or problem-solving protocol.

We make two claims in the paper: 1) there is a general, formalizable set of multi-agent protocols that account for an interesting class of composite systems, and 2) one can evaluate a given protocol on the ability and reliability of its constituent agents, and on the amount of interference agents have in carrying out their roles. We describe a design model based on these two claims, and then rationally reconstruct an existing composite system using our model. From this we make sufficiency and necessity arguments.