This work proposes a new coordination system for the environment of a Multi-Agent System by merging the features from two important contributions to this field of research, Organizational Mechanisms and Artifacts. Organizational mechanisms can be introduced into a Multi-Agent System with the aim of influencing the behavior of agents populating it to achieve their goals in a proper way. In this paper, we propose to model organizational mechanisms by means of artifacts, which are non-proactive entities used by agents. Artifacts were presented within the Agents & Artifacts conceptual framework, and that present good advantages for coordinating agents' environments. We put forward a formal model that defines how organizational mechanisms can be designed by using artifacts theory. We validate the approach by presenting a case study focused on a real health care domain problem. Additionally, the Artifacts for Organizational Mechanisms are compared with some different proposed artifacts.

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This work presents an extension of the Environment Dimension of the Virtual Organization Model, which is an Organization Modeling Language to define OrganizationCentered Multi-Agent Systems. This extension allows this model to regulate the environment by supporting artifacts for organizational mechanisms, an approach based on the Agents & Artifacts conceptual framework. The three main entities of this framework are agents, artifacts and workspaces, which have been integrated in this work inside the Virtual Organization Model. Additionally, this paper presents an application to the health care setting and an analysis of the related work on this topic.

This paper addresses energy-aware room allocation management where the system aims to satisfy individuals' needs as much as possible while concerning total energy consumption in a building. In the problem, there are a several rooms having varied settings resulting in different energy consumption. The main objective of the system is not only finding the right allocations for user's need, but also minimizing energy consumption. However, the users of the system may have conflicting preferences over the rooms to be allocated for them. This paper pursues how the system can increase user satisfaction while achieving its goals. For that purpose, an adaptation of the mediated single text negotiation model is introduced. The proposal seeks to guarantee an upper bound on energy consumption by pruning the negotiation space via a genetic algorithm, and to take advantage of the negotiation for increasing user satisfaction. Experiments suggest that the adaptations improve the performance.