Towards Agent Organizations Interoperability: A Model Driven Engineering Approach

Abstract

In the research and development of multiagent systems (MAS), one of the central issues is how to conciliate the autonomy of the agents with a desirable and stable behavior of the MAS as a whole. Agent organizations have been proposed as a suitable metaphor for engineering social order in MAS. However, this emphasis has led to several proposals of organizational models for MAS design, thus creating an organizational interoperability problem: How to ensure that agents, possibly designed to work with different organizational models, could interact and collectively solve problems? In this paper, we have adopted techniques from Model Driven Engineering to handle this problem. In particular, we propose an abstract and integrated view of the main concepts that have been used to specify agent organizations, based on several organizational models present in the literature. We apply this integrated view to design MAORI, a model-based architecture for organizational interoperability. We present a MAORI application example that has shown that our approach is computationally feasible, enabling agents endowed with heterogeneous organizational models to cooperatively solve a problem.