Balancing Organizational Regulation and Agent Autonomy: An MDE-Based Approach

  • Loris Penserini
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Athanasios Staikopoulos
  • Huib Aldewereld
  • Frank Dignum
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5881)

Abstract

The deployment of agent societies —as complex systems— in dynamic and unpredictable settings brings forth critical issues concerning their design. Organizational models have been advocated to specify open systems in dynamic environments in order to accomplish the need to represent regulating structures explicitly and independently from acting components (or agents). Despite the fact that several frameworks have been proposed for the specification of organizational models, it is still a matter of design choice how to balance between regulative design and component flexibility.

We propose a design framework, discussing the advantages of having different degrees of abstraction at organizational level in the development of agent societies. That is, we illustrate how the design properties impact the flexibility of run-time systems to cope with context changes. We adopt the OperA software engineering methodology to deal with the organizational model specification, and the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) mechanisms to map concepts between different design models.

Keywords

Organizational Level Organizational Model Context Change Coordination Model Model Drive Engineer 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Loris Penserini
    • 1
  • Virginia Dignum
    • 1
  • Athanasios Staikopoulos
    • 2
  • Huib Aldewereld
    • 1
  • Frank Dignum
    • 1
  1. 1.Institute of Information and Computing SciencesUniversiteit UtrechtUtrechtThe Netherlands
  2. 2.Computer ScienceTrinity College DublinIreland

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