OperA+: a model for context-aware organizational interactions in virtual organizations

Virtual organizations are complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments where independent organizations work together for some collective goals. To ensure that the goals are achieved in a predicable way, regulating structures should be represented explicitly and independently from the acting components at different abstraction levels, which on the one hand enables stakeholders with different value orientations to communicate their organizational knowledge and analyze the overall setup, and on the other hand, makes sure that the integrated interaction processes are performed in a secure and smooth way. Agent-based organizational models provide a good basis for the design and analysis of such regulating structures since organizational interactions in virtual organizations can be well described as agent interactions in regulated multi-agent systems. Instead of starting from scratch, our research is based on an existing agent-based organizational modeling framework OperA [1] and dedicates to modeling organizational interactions in virtual organizations. The new framework is named OperA+ and improves organizational modeling from two perspectives. On the one hand, the conformity requested by solution designers is ensured by adopting the idea of compositionality and contextualization in the organizational design of agent societies including social structure, normative structure and interaction structure. On the other hand, the autonomy desired by actors/agents can be guaranteed by the multi-level organizational design and evaluations from the perspective of agent operations. Finally, a balance between conformity and autonomy can be achieved in a context-aware organizational model.