Multi-agent organizations in software engineering Jorge J. Gómez Sanz Grasia! Research group Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Organizations in software engineering  Current methodologies do consider organizational concepts but methodologies are about modeling... mainly Modeling vs constructing ad hoc solutions  Implementation of these concerns are needed, but how to move from specification to implementation?

What methodologies think about organizations?  Organizations: static and dynamic views  First: very few methodologies have some concern about implementation, even less have concerns about implementation of organizations  Some examples MESSAGE/UML: Organization and organization groups appear as knowledge and java packages  There are demos Adelfe: emergence through cooperation rules  There are demos Gaia: norms & roles  Lack of implementation SADDE. Electronic institutions  Centralizing communications INGENIAS: bases on roles and concepts from AAladin  Needs defining computational realizations for organizational concepts

An example  INGENIAS do consider organizations but no clear semantics, i.e. code, have been provided, yet  We try to implement an organization by mapping specification to code There is a program that translates one to another Automatic mapping is relevant here: It tells exactly what you thought each entity in your specification would do  The implementation tries to define the skills an agent need to become part of an organization over an agent platform: JADE The organization is represented by an agent Protocols, tasks, knowledge  This example is available at Development manual update after this TF

Conclusions  Though the ontologies of current methodologies take into account organizational concepts, most of them are static views of the organization  Dynamics can be described indirectly by means of other constructs

Why organizations are so difficult?  There is work in finding computational realizations for some entities Interactions Resources Intelligence  We know what “social” means in the context of human societies, but in agents is not that easy Roles: Kendall and aspect oriented programming ( a role is an aspect) Groups: Ferber & Gutnecht  Aaladin Electronic Institutions: Sierra et al.  Islander  We need more theoretical results Castelfranchi, Simao, Sichman, Demazeau DEPNET, DEPINT, Social dependencies