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

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Reforming decentralized integrated health care systems: Theory and the case of the Norwegian reform

In this essay a conceptual and theoretical scheme for decentralized integrated health care systems of the northern European kind is developed. With small changes it is also applicable to other countries, e.g. Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Three ideas tie together the scheme: modified fiscal federalism, principalagent thinking and the analysis of discrete structural alternatives from new institutional economics. As a special case it encompasses the ideas of planned markets and public competition developed by von Otter and Saltman. The scheme can be used to analyse driving forces behind reforms and prediction of effects. To illustrate the thinking the recent Norwegian reform is put into context, not only geographically but also theoretically. The geographical context is that of Scandinavia and there is a summary of reforms in the Scandinavian countries over the past 20-30 years. The essay thus serves the double purpose of presenting and evaluating the Norwegian reform in a Scandinavian context and to take part in the neglected discipline of developing a theory of health care reform. The Norwegian January 2002 reform is described in some detail. It is a reversal of the Scandinavian model of decentralization and a move towards more centralism. The hospital system was transferred to the state that established five regions with independent (non-political) boards and each region has a number of daughters (hospitals) that have great autonomy with their own boards and are outside the legal restrictions of the public sector. Basically the idea is to mimic the corporate structure of large private companies. The reform is evaluated based on principal-agent thinking and the analysis of discrete structural alternatives. Overall there is no a priori reason to expect large improvements in efficiency – but on the other hand neither should one expect things to get worse. Many effects depend, however, crucially, on (a) the financing system that will be put in place late 2002 or early 2003, and (b) whether or not the political and management culture change as a result of the reform. In the concluding sections possible implications for Denmark and Sweden are discussed.Health care reform; Norway; principal-agents; discrete structural analysis

CHAPTER 10: UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS POLITICS AND POLICY OUTCOMES: DOES CLASS IDENTITY MATTER?

This chapter in Clark and lipset\u27s book on class in American politics resulted from a multi-day workshop at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in the summer of 1999. The piece reverses the normal causality of class politics. It does not analyze citizens in elections, but government officials creating policies. It asks why policies differ across localities (specifically public transit decisions in 42 U.S. metropolitan areas). It probes how some government officials work with an upper-middle-class citizenry in mind, while others do so less. The chapter then tests for differences across localities and finds quite distinct patterns. The chapter next elaborates specific contours of the American upper middle class, in a creative merging of themes from Thorsein Veblen and David Riesman to current work on public policy

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Theories about architecture and performance of multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems are promising as models of organization because they are based on the idea that most work in human organizations is done based on intelligence, communication, cooperation, and massive parallel processing. They offer an alternative for system theories of organization, which are rather abstract of nature and do not pay attention to the agent level. In contrast, classical organization theories offer a rather rich source of inspiration for developing multi-agent models because of their focus on the agent level. This paper studies the plausibility of theoretical choices in the construction of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems have to be plausible from a philosophical, psychological, and organizational point of view. For each of these points of view, alternative theories exist. Philosophically, the organization can be seen from the viewpoints of realism and constructivism. Psychologically, several agent types can be distinguished. A main problem in the construction of psychologically plausible computer agents is the integration of response function systems with representational systems. Organizationally, we study aspects of the architecture of multi-agent systems, namely topology, system function decomposition, coordination and synchronization of agent processes, and distribution of knowledge and language characteristics among agents. For each of these aspects, several theoretical perspectives exist.

Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs