Multi-Agent systems and organizations

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are emerging as a promising paradigm for conceptualizing, designing and implementing large-scale heterogeneous software systems. The key advantage of looking at components in such systems as autonomous agents is that as agents they are capable of flexible self-organization, instead of being rigidly organized by the system's architect. However, self-organization is like evolution-it takes a lot of time and the results are not guaranteed. More often than not, the system's architect has an idea about how the agents should organize themselves-what types of organizations they should form. In our work, we tried to solve the problem of modelling organizations and their roles in a MAS, independent of the particular agent platform on which the MAS will eventually run. First and foremost, we have proposed a metamodel for expressing platform-independent organization models. Furthermore, we have implemented the proposed metamodel for the Jade agent platform as a module extending this framework. Finally, we have demonstrated the use of our module by modelling three specific organizations: remote function invocation, arithmetic expression evaluation and sealed-bid auction. Our work shows how to separate the behaviour acquired through a role from the behaviour intrinsic to an agent. This..