Reorganization in Multi-Agent Architectures: An Active Graph Grammar Approach

Background: Organizational architecture is a holistic approach to design of humane organizations and studies an organization from five perspectives: structure, culture, processes, strategy and individuals. In this paper the concept of organizational architecture is firstly formalized using the fractal principle and then applied to multi-agent systems’ (MAS) organizations. Objectives: Providing a holistic framework for modelling all aspects of MASreorganization. Methods/Approach: MAS organizations are formalized using graph theory and a new active graph rewriting formalism inspired by the active database theory is introduced. Results: The newly developed framework is graphical, event-driven and applied in a distributed MAS environment. Conclusions: By defining organizational units, processes, strategies and cultural artefacts in a recursive way, it is shown that labelled graphs and hypergraphs can be used to model various levels of organizational architecture while active graph grammars allow one to model reorganization of each of the architectural perspectives

Reasoning about Social Semantic Web Applications using String Similarity and Frame Logic

Social semantic Web or Web 3.0 application gained major attention from academia and industry in recent times. Such applications try to take advantage of user supplied meta data, using ideas from the semantic Web initiative, in order to provide better services. An open problem is the formalization of such meta data, due to its complex and often inconsistent nature. A possible solution to inconsistencies are string similarity metrics which are explained and analyzed. A study of performance and applicability in a frame logic environment is conducted on the case of agent reasoning about multiple domains in TaOPis - a social semantic Web application for self-organizing communities. Results show that the NYSIIS metric yields surprisingly good results on Croatian words and phrases

Towards a General Definition of Biometric Systems

A foundation for closing the gap between biometrics in the narrower and the broader perspective is presented trough a conceptualization of biometric systems in both perspectives. A clear distinction between verification, identification and classification systems is made as well as shown that there are additional classes of biometric systems. In the end a Unified Modeling Language model is developed showing the connections between the two perspectives

Autopoietic Theory as a Framework for Biometrics

Autopoietic theory which represents a framework for describing complex non-linear and especially living systems is described in a context of biometric characteristics. It is argued that any living system by performing an internal process of reproducing its structural components yields physical biometric characteristics. Likewise any living system when structurally coupling to another (eventually allopoietic) system yields a behavioral or psychological characteristic of the living system. It is shown that any system that can be considered as autopoietic can potentially be measured, authenticated and/or identified using adequate biometric methods, and thus biometrics is applicable to any autopoietic system: living beings, groups of living beings, social systems, organizations as well as information systems. In the end implications of such a conceptualization are discussed as well as possible applications

Smart Residential Buildings as Learning Agent Organizations in the Internet of Things

Background: Smart buildings are one of the major application areas of technologies bound to embedded systems and the Internet of things. Such systems have to be adaptable and flexible in order to provide better services to its residents. Modelling such systems is an open research question. Herein, the question is approached using an organizational modelling methodology bound to the principles of the learning organization. Objectives: Providing a higher level of abstraction for understanding, developing and maintaining smart residential buildings in a more human understandable form. Methods/Approach: Organization theory provides us with the necessary concepts and methodology to approach complex organizational systems. Results: A set of principles for building learning agent organizations, a formalization of learning processes for agents, a framework for modelling knowledge transfer between agents and the environment, and a tailored organizational structure for smart residential buildings based on Nonaka’s hypertext organizational form. Conclusions: Organization theory is a promising field of research when dealing with complex engineering systems

Social Network Mixing Patterns in Mergers and Acquisitions-A Simulation Experiment

In the contemporary world of global business and continuously growing competition, organizations tend to use mergers and acquisitions to enforce their position on the market. The future organization’s design is a critical success factor in such undertakings. The field of social network analysis can enhance our uderstanding of these processes as it lets us reason about the development of networks, regardless of their origin. The analysis of mixing patterns is particularly useful as it provides an insight into how nodes in a network connect with each other. We hypothesize that organizational networks with compatible mixing patterns will be integrated more successfully. After conducting a simulation experiment, we suggest an integration model based on the analysis of network assortativity. The model can be a guideline for organizational integration, such as occurs in mergers and acquisitions.mergers & acquisition, social network,analysis, mixing patterns, assortativity, organizational design

Kritische Betrachtung der Theorie der Selbsterschaffung und ihrer Anwendung auf lebende, gesellschaftliche, Organisations- und Informationssysteme

Autopoietic theory, a theory of complex, non-linear, autonomous and especially living systems, found its way from biology, through the social sciences to organization theory and information systems. It enjoys major attention from scientific audiences in lots of different disciplines. Still, there hasn\u27t been enough effort to establish a common foundation for a new theory. There are often contradictions in the very essence of the theory which are outlined in this article. By using a more simplistic conceptualization of autopoiesis, we are trying to give guidelines for a new foundation in this area.Teorija autopoiesisa ili samostvaranja, teorija o složenim, nelinearnim, autonomnim i prije svega živim sustavima, našla je svoj put iz biologije preko društvenih znanosti k organizacijskoj teoriji i informacijskim sustavima. Ovo je područje od velikog interesa za znanstvenu javnost te se obrađuje i iskorištava u relativno velikom broju disciplina. Ipak, čini se da još nisu učinjeni dovoljni napori kako bi se uspostavili temelji za novu teoriju. Često se može naići na kontradikcije u samim njezinim temeljima, kao što se pokušava pokazati u ovom članku. Koristeći se jednostavnijom konceptualizacijom autopoietične teorije, pokušavamo dati smjernice prema uspostavljanju novoga temelja.Die Theorie der Autopoiesis ist die Theorie der Selbsterschaffung von komplexen, nicht-linearen, autonomen und vor allem lebenden Systemen, die aus der Biologie stammt und über die Gesellschaftswissenschaften Eingang in die Organisationstheorie und Informationssysteme gefunden hat. Dieser Bereich ist von großem Interesse für die wissenschaftliche Öffentlichkeit und wird daher für eine relativ große Anzahl anderer Disziplinen fruchtbar gemacht. Dennoch fehlt es offensichtlich immer noch an den notwendigen Anstrengungen, um die Grundlagen dieser neuen Theorie zu festigen. Wie die Verfasser des Artikels zeigen, ist die Grundlagendiskussion häufig widersprüchlich. Ausgehend von einer einfacheren Konzeptualisierung der autopoietischen Theorie versuchen sie daher Richtlinien für eine neue Grundlegung vorzugeben

Towards an Agent Based Framework for Modelling Smart Self-Sustainable Systems

Self-sustainability is a property of a system; a system is considered to be self-sustainable if it can sustain itself without external support in an observed period of time. If this property is mapped to a human settlement in context of resources (water, energy, food, etc.), it would describe a human settlement which is independent of external resources (like the national electrical grid or a central water distribution system), where such external resources are either not available, or not desirable. This article contributes to presenting the state-of-the-art overview of self-sustainability-related research. While self-sustainability as in the above described form was not a direct subject of research, there are several fields which are either related to, or could be of significant value to the self-sustainability research in this context. The extensive literature overview also showed no frameworks for modeling self sustainable systems in the context of human settlements. Herein a motivation for using agent-based modeling and simulation techniques will be given

Recovering the Past: Eastern European Web Mining Platforms for Reconstructing Political Attitudes

During the past half century, the political attitude of the Eastern European people toward the state, government and society changed dramatically. So did their value systems. Inglehart's materialist vs. post-materialist comparative analysis gives a measure of this value change, but not enough as to fully characterize the phenomena underlining the differences in political culture before and after the Fall of Berlin Wall. Little has left from the communist regimes to prove how this change actually occurred and where we are as compared to the stable democratic regimes. With rare exceptions, no public survey has been developed in the Eastern European countries between 1950-1990 able to mirror people's true beliefs and values. In order to understand the current value systems and political attitudes of the people in the Eastern Europe, we have to recover the past. One way to do that is to identify key concepts in the texts, discourses, audio and video recordings of the past times. The present paper provides the rationale of this approach and describes a system which works on dynamically collecting content-based items from library and web references and resources. The system currently works on concepts described by single words or compound expressions, and could be extended so as to work on multimedia items, like words, images, and sounds (voices, music, audio signals, etc.). Our approach aims at constructing a dynamic system and an open access repository of content-based collections of the past and offers a research instrument to the students of political attitudes toward democracy and freedom of the people in Eastern Europe. We approach the problem of recovering the historical process of political change in the Eastern European societies known as the Fall of Berlin Wall in terms of political attitude change modeling and simulation. Modeling makes intensive use of web and data mining technologies for identifying political attitude structural configurations in patterns of value and belief change. Based on web-extracted political attitude configurations, simulation provides a clue on how political attitude structure looks like, and how political attitude change emerges in macro level political change phenomena

Biomimetics in Modern Organizations - Laws or Metaphors?

Biomimetics, the art and science of imitating nature and life for technological solutions is discussed from a modern organization theory perspective. The main hypothesis of this article is that there are common laws in nature that are applicable to living, social and likewise organizational systems. To take advantage of these laws, the study of nature's principles for their application to organizations is proposed - a process which is in product and technology design known as bionic creativity engineering. In a search for most interesting concepts borrowed from nature we found amoeba organizations, the theory of autopoiesis or self-creation, neural networks, heterarchies, as well as fractals and bioteaming which are described and reviewed. Additionally other concepts like swarm intelligence, stigmergy, as well as genesis and reproduction, are introduced. In the end all these ideas are summarized and guidelines for further research are given.biomimetics, organization theory, autopoiesis, network science, bionic creativity engineering