OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Designing for planned emergence in multi-agent systems

We present an approach for designing organization-oriented multi-agent systems (MASs) to allow improvisation at run time when agents are not available to exactly match the original organizational design structure. Working with system components from an existing MAS organizational meta-model, OJAzzIC, the approach sets out five stages for the design process. We illustrate the design approach with an incident response scenario implemented in the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) environment, and show how agents at runtime can improvise- for example they can adopt tasks even if those tasks do not precisely match a predefined role. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Agreeing on role adoption in open organisations

The organisational specification of a multi-agent system supports agents’ effectiveness in attaining their purpose, or prevent certain undesired behaviour from occurring. This requires that agents are able to find out about the organisational purpose and description and decide on its appropriateness for their own objectives. Organisational modeling languages are used to specify an agent system in terms of its roles, organizational structure, norms, etc. Agents take part in organisations by playing one or more of the specified roles for which they have the necessary capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the process of role adoption in the context of the well-known OperA organisational modelling language. In OperA, each organisation has a gatekeeper role responsible for admitting agents to the organisation. Agents playing the role of gatekeeper can interact with agents that want to enter the organisation in order to come to agreement on role adoption. That is, negotiate which roles they will play and under which conditions they will play them. This is possible by evaluating capability requirements for roles. We extend OperA to allow for the specification of role capabilities. This approach will be illustrated using the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) domain.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen