An Assistance Infrastructure to Inform Agents for Decision Support in open MAS

Organisations are an effective mechanism to define the coordination model that structure agent interactions in Open MAS. Execution infrastructures mediate agents interactions while enforcing the rules imposed by the organisation. Although infrastructures usually provide open specifications to agents, understanding this specification and participating in the organisation could result a difficult task to agents, specially when the system is hybrid (i.e participants can be both human and software agents) and its specification becomes more and more complex. In this paper we further formalise a two layered Assistance Infrastructure in order to enable and evaluate different Assistance Services to agents in MAS. We also formalise the Information Service and evaluate it using the case study of a water market. Experiments results show that the information service increases agents satisfaction and helps the system meets its organisational goals. In addition, different information services may support individual agents in their decision processes when they follow alternative strategies.