Organizational and Social Concepts in Agent Oriented Software Engineering

AOSE methodologies and models borrow abstractions and concepts from organizational and social disciplines. Although they all view multi-agent systems as organized society, the organizational abstractions, assumptions, concepts, and models in them are actually used in different ways. It is therefore desirable to have a systematic way of analyzing and comparing the organizational and social concepts in AOSE. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we identify some premises behind the social conceptions adopted in multi-agent systems. Secondly, we define levels of modeling constructs and classify organizational and social concepts in the AOSE literature into categories according to their organizational abstractions. Finally, we analyze two representative AOSE methodologies and their models, explaining how they use organizational and social concepts to analyze and specify multi-agent system, reflecting various social premises at different levels.

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