Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve global (or organizational) objectives by more or less autonomous agents. In order to develop a theory on the relation between organizational structures, organizational objectives and the actions of agents fulfilling roles in the organization a theoretical framework is needed to describe organizational structures and actions of (groups of) agents. Current logical formalisms focus on specific aspects of organizations (e.g. power, delegation, agent actions, or normative issues) but a framework that integrates and relates different aspects is missing. Given the amount of aspects involved and the subsequent complexity of a formalism encompassing them all, it is difficult to realize. In this paper, a first step is taken to solve this problem. We present a generic formal model that enables to specify and relate the main concepts of an organization (including, activity, structure, environment and others) so that organizations can be analyzed at a high level of abstraction. However, for some aspects we use a simplified model in order to avoid the complexity of combining many different types of (modal) operators.
Besides the formal, logical approaches towards organizational description and analysis there are also engineering frameworks. They provide sound representation languages that include many realistic organizational concepts, but have often a limited formal semantic basis, which makes analysis and comparison difficult @cite_18 @cite_23 @cite_34 . LAO is able to provide a basis for formal semantics to these engineering approaches. We already showed that it is possible to formalize some organizations described in quite different approaches.
@cite_18 @cite_34 @cite_23
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The Multi-agent Systems (MAS) area, while concerning heterogeneous and open systems, has evolved towards the specification of global constraints that agents are supposed to follow. A subset of these constraints are known as organisation of the MAS. This paper describes a software implementation, called @math , that tries to fill the gap between the organisational constraints and the agents autonomy. This software ensures that all agents will follow the organisation without requiring that they are developed in a specific language or architecture. A new, formal, role-based, framework for modeling and analyzing both real world and artificial organizations is introduced. It exploits static and dynamic properties of the organizational model and includes the (frequently ignored) environment. The transition is described from a generic framework of an organization to its deployed model and to the actual agent allocation. For verification and validation purposes, a set of dedicated techniques is introduced. Moreover, where most models can handle only two or three layered organizational structures, our framework can handle any arbitrary number of organizational layers. Henceforth, real-world organizations can be modeled and analyzed, as illustrated by a case study, within the DEAL project line. In the engineering of multi-agent systems both the analyst and architect may benefit by thinking about the solution in terms of the roles that agents may enact and the relationships between them. The organisational structure thus produced provides an effective way to capture medium- to long-term associations and dependencies between agents. In this paper we propose a means to formally specify, verify and analyse agent organisations, capturing notions of role, obligation and delegation (of obligations). Furthermore, our framework allows change in the organisational structure to be modelled and alternative organisation specifications to be developed in order to handle the consequences of change. Our model gives rise to a suite of tools and functionalities with which engineers can specify, verify and analyse organisations, the roles of their components, their obligations and the relationships among these roles.