Instrumenting multi-agent organisations with organisational artifacts and agents

The social and organisational aspects of agency have led to a good amount of theoretical work in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of proper organisational infrastructures embodying such models and theories are still an open issue. The introduction of normative concerns with requirements of openness and adaptation stresses this issue. The corresponding mechanisms for the current infrastructures appear to be not appropriate for managing distributed and open normative organisations. There is still the need of proper abstractions and tools to facilitate application agents taking part in the monitoring of the organisation on one hand, and in the adaptation and definition of the organisation in which they are situated on the other hand. In this paper we present and discuss ORA4MAS (Organisational Artifacts for Multi-Agent Systems), a proposed approach aiming at these issues. Based on the Agents and Artifacts meta-model (A&A), it introduces organisational artifacts as first class entities to instrument the organisation for supporting agents activities within it.

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