INTEGRATING AGENT, SERVICE AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMPUTING

Abstract

Engineering open complex systems is challenging because of system complexities such as openness, the involvement of organizational factors and service delivery. It cannot be handled well by the single use of existing computing techniques such as agent-based computing and service-oriented computing. Due to the intrinsic organizational characteristics and the request of service delivery, an integrative computing paradigm combining agent, service, organizational and social computing can open complex systems more effectively engineering. In this paper, we briefly introduce an integrative computing approach named OASOC for system analysis and design. It combines and complements the strengths of agent, service and organizational computing to handle the complexities of open complex systems. OASOC provides facilities for organization-oriented analysis and agent service-oriented design. It also supports transition between analysis and design. Compared with the existing approaches, our approach can (1) support service and organization that are either rarely or weakly covered by single computing methods, (2) provide effective mechanisms to integrate agent, service and organizational computing, and (3) complement the strengths of various methods. Experiences in engineering an online trading support system have further shown the workable capability of integrating agent, service and organizational computing for engineering open complex systems.