Automatic Generation of Distributed Team Formation Algorithms from Organizational Models

Software systems are subject to ever increasing complexity and in need of efficient structuring. The concept of organization as an expressive and abstract real-world reference presents a promising starting point. Organizational concepts have particularly been studied within the multi-agent systems community. However, there exists a conceptual gap between organizational specifications and their multi-agent implementation. We address this problem by presenting an integrated approach to formalize organizational models with Petri nets and to directly deploy these specifications in a multi-agent system. The operational semantics of Petri nets establishes a close link between organizational specification and deployment that eases system development and maintenance. As an important example, we are able to describe the formation of multi-agent teams in an organizational scenario in terms of Petri net dynamics.