The AORTA Architecture: Integrating Organizational Reasoning in Jason

Abstract

Abstract. Open systems are characterized by a diversity of heterogeneous and autonomous agents that act according to private goals, and with a behavior that is hard to predict. They can be regulated through organizations similar to human organizations, which regulate the agents' behavior space and describe the expected behavior of the agents. Agents need to be able to reason about the regulations, so that they can act within the expected boundaries and work towards the objectives of the organization. In this paper, we propose the AORTA 1 architecture for making agents organization-aware. It is designed such that it provides organizational reasoning capabilities to agents implemented in existing agent programming languages without being tied to a specific organizational model. We show how it can be integrated in the Jason agent programming language, and discuss how the agents can coordinate their organizational tasks using AORTA.

A framework for organization-aware agents

“…As mentioned, we have implemented an earlier version of the framework in Java and have integrated it with the Jason platform [30]. We plan to extend that work with the complete and updated operational semantics presented in this paper.…”

“…Given that our component is designed to be independent from the cognitive agent, we need to ensure 1) that changing the agent's beliefs (or goals) does not create inconsistencies in the agent's reasoning and 2) that the agent's beliefs (or goals) used in the organizational reasoning does not change during the organizational reasoning phases. In [30], we showed that both of these issues could be addressed by executing the AORTA reasoning cycle and the cognitive agent's reasoning cycle sequentially. Since the two cycles are not executed in parallel, changes to the agent's beliefs, goals or organizational beliefs will only be used (and altered) by a single process.…”

“…In this paper, we present a complete version of the operational semantics of the AORTA 1 reasoning framework [29,30], which provides cognitive agents with a component that enable them to reason about organizational models and to act upon them. In [29], we first presented AORTA, and in [30], we provided an implementation of the framework, integrated with Jason.…”

“…In [29], we first presented AORTA, and in [30], we provided an implementation of the framework, integrated with Jason. This paper extends the AORTA framework as follows:…”

Adding Organizational Reasoning to Agent-Based Simulations in GAMA

“…MOISE+ is an organization meta-model which has been implemented in the Jason agent programming platform [10,11]. In contrast we use AORTA, which has also been implemented in Jason [12], and GAMA, which is an agent-based simulation platform. There are also other methods to include normative reasoning in agents which do not incorporate an organization meta-model [13][14][15].…”