Enhancing Mas Environments With Organizational Mechanisms

Abstract

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.

Commitments and interaction norms in organisations

“…As usual in interdisciplinary research, there is no consensus on the best definition, which depends on the use of the concepts in a discipline. For computational purposes, organisations are typically modelled by, for example, concurrent coordinated systems, coordination mechanisms, collaborative systems, workflow systems, business processes, electronic institutions, or virtual environments [7,28,29,38,45,47,56,[65][66][67].…”

Artifacting and Regulating the Environment of a Virtual Organization

“…For this reason, the Artifacts for Organizational Mechanisms [10] were developed. They model the Organizational Mechanisms [9] by means of artifacts from the Agents & Artifacts (A&A) conceptual framework [8].…”

“…In particular: (i) artifacts for organizational mechanisms theory provides concepts that help designers to model the environment [10]; (ii) we intend to enable regulation of the environment by using artifacts for organizational mechanisms abstractions; and (iii) also provide reusable first-class abstractions to build regulating mechanisms at design time.…”

“…VOM will be modified so as to support concepts such as artifacts and organizational mechanisms that help describing and operating with the environment. As starting point, the work presented in [10] is taken into account, where both proposals, artifacts and organizational mechanisms, were merged to define Artifacts for Organizational Mechanisms, which are provided with functionalities that modify and improve the global behavior of a MAS.…”

“…On the one hand, we put forward a work that merges the concepts of artifacts and organizational mechanisms, the artifacts for organizational mechanisms [10]. On the other hand, the remainder of the section will describe the Virtual Organization Model [11], which is the Organizational Modeling Language (OML) chosen for this work, as previously explained.…”