Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper proposes a basis to design coordination models in multi-agent systems. This proposal is based on the exploitation of an in-depth exploration of a well-experienced sociological theory, the Sociology of Organized Action, also called Strategic Analysis. This theory intends to discover the functioning of any organization beyond its formal rules, especially how social actors build the organization that in return rules their behaviors, and which are the mechanisms they use to regulate their interactions. We first present the concepts developed by this theory to reveal the strategic aspects of the actors’ behaviors in an organized actions framework. Then we introduce a meta-model that allows us to describe the structure of Concrete Action Systems and how social actors handle its elements. A classical case study is used to illustrate the approach.

A new, formal, role-based, framework for modeling and analyzing both real world and artificial organizations is introduced. It exploits static and dynamic properties of the organizational model and includes the (frequently ignored) environment. The transition is described from a generic framework of an organization to its deployed model and to the actual agent allocation. For verification and validation purposes, a set of dedicated techniques is introduced. Moreover, where most models can handle only two or three layered organizational structures, our framework can handle any arbitrary number of organizational layers. Henceforth, real-world organizations can be modeled and analyzed, as illustrated by a case study, within the DEAL project line.

Collaboration environments impose high demands on humans and artificial systems. Especially during critical tasks team members, including humans, artificial systems and other (sub-) teams, require support to guarantee their continued effectiveness. Effectiveness of individuals and teams is an important ingredient for organizational effectiveness, managerial decision quality, as well as for maintaining organizational awareness. In this position paper we introduce our conceptual view on realizing sustained team effectiveness, in which both the measurement of effectiveness and team management play an important role. A unified, interdisciplinary approach facilitates measuring effectiveness in more complex organizations.

In the engineering of multi-agent systems both the analyst and architect may benefit by thinking about the solution in terms of the roles that agents may enact and the relationships between them. The organisational structure thus produced provides an effective way to capture medium- to long-term associations and dependencies between agents. In this paper we propose a means to formally specify, verify and analyse agent organisations, capturing notions of role, obligation and delegation (of obligations). Furthermore, our framework allows change in the organisational structure to be modelled and alternative organisation specifications to be developed in order to handle the consequences of change. Our model gives rise to a suite of tools and functionalities with which engineers can specify, verify and analyse organisations, the roles of their components, their obligations and the relationships among these roles.

The Multi-agent Systems (MAS) area, while concerning heterogeneous and open systems, has evolved towards the specification of global constraints that agents are supposed to follow. A subset of these constraints are known as organisation of the MAS. This paper describes a software implementation, called , that tries to fill the gap between the organisational constraints and the agents autonomy. This software ensures that all agents will follow the organisation without requiring that they are developed in a specific language or architecture.

The regulation of multiagent systems may be approached from different stand-points. In this paper I will take the perspective of using a certain type of devices, electronic institutions, to regulate agent interactions. Furthermore, in this paper I am concerned with the tasks of design and construction of actual electronic institutions and I will explore some of the empirical aspects that one may encounter in such activities. More specifically, I will focus on those empirical aspects that are characteristic of electronic institutions rather than those that may be typical of multi–agent systems development in general or other types of software engineering. I use three examples of actual electronic institutions that show different and complementary features in order to motivate a number of distinctions that may be used to treat empirical features in a systematic way.

In this paper we discuss the use of the Answer Set Programming paradigm for representing and analysing specifications of agent-based institutions. We outline the features of institutions we model, and describe how they are translated into ASP programs which can then be used to verify properties of the specifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through the institutions of property and exchange.

This paper is about control mechanisms for virtual organizations. As a case study, we discuss the Renewables Obligation (RO), a control mechanism that was introduced in the United Kingdom to stimulate the production of renewable energy. We apply a conceptual model based on normative multiagent systems (NMAS). We propose to model both the participants and the normative system as autonomous agents, having beliefs and goals. Norms, which can be internalized by the agents as obligations, are translated into conditional beliefs and goals of the normative system, which concern both detection and sanctioning measures. We show that the model can handle both the regulative and the evidential aspects of the case.

As agent autonomy emphasises the need of norms for governing agent interactions, increasing attention is being devoted to (electronic) institutions for modelling organisations governed by norms. Moving from the concepts of role (with its normative consequences, i.e. obligations, permissions and prohibitions), norms (both regulative and constitutive), and normative agents, we first introduce the notion of for modelling norm-regulated MAS. Then, we discuss how infrastructural abstractions like coordination artifacts can be exploited to express norms inside computational institutions. Finally, we present an example based on the TuCSoN infrastructure.

The notion of artificial institution is crucial for the specification of open and dynamic interaction frameworks where heterogeneous and autonomous agents can interact to face problems in various fields. In our view the specification of artificial institutions requires a clear standard definition of some basic concepts: the notion of ontology, authorizations, conventions, and the normative component. In this paper we propose an event driven approach to the definition of norms that is mainly based on the manipulation of commitments. We will discuss the crucial differences between the notion of authorization and permission and how the notion of permissions, obligations, and prohibitions can be expressed in our model. We will investigate the connections among the specification of different artificial institutions, in particular how an institution can enrich or further regulate the entities defined in another one. Finally we will briefly present the specification of the Dutch Auction Institution and of the Auction House Institution in order to exemplify the model presented in this paper.