International audienceThe social and organisational aspects of agency have led to a good amount of theoretical work in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of proper organisational infrastructures embodying such models and theories are still an open issue. The introduction of normative concerns with requirements of openness and adaptation stresses this issue. The corresponding mechanisms for the current infrastructures appear to be not appropriate for managing distributed and open normative organisations. There is still the need of proper abstractions and tools to facilitate application agents taking part in the monitoring of the organisation on one hand, and in the adaptation and definition of the organisation in which they are situated on the other hand. In this paper we present and discuss ORA4MAS (Organisational Artifacts for Multi-Agent Systems), a proposed approach aiming at these issues. Based on the Agents and Artifacts meta-model ( A&A ), it introduces organisational artifacts as first class entities to instrument the organisation for supporting agents activities within it

Abstract. The social and organisational aspects of agency have have become nowadays a major focus of interest in the MAS community, and a good amount of theoretical work is available, in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of proper organisational infrastructures embodying such models and theories is still an open issue, in particular when open MAS are considered. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss a model for an organisational infrastructure called ORA4MAS that aims at addressing these issues. By being based on the A&A (Agents and Artifacts) meta-model, the key and novel aspect introduced with ORA4MAS is that organisations and the organisation infrastructure itself are conceived in terms of agents and artifacts, as first-class basic abstractions giving body to the MAS from design to runtime. This is in analogy with human organisation and organisation infrastructures, that are populated by humans (as participants and part of the organisation machinery), and by rich sets of artifacts and tools that humans use to support their activities inside the organisation and the organisation itself, encapsulating essential infrastructure services.