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Organising MAS: a formal model based on organisational mechanisms

Published: 08 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a general formal framework for organising multiagent systems whose participants are rational agents. This model is based on the idea of organisational mechanisms. These are mechanisms introduced in a multiagent system with the aim of influencing the behaviour of the agents towards more effectiveness with regard to some objectives. We define two kinds of organisational mechanisms: i) informative mechanisms which provide additional information to agents, that may persuade agents to behave in a certain way, and ii) regulative mechanisms which produce changes in the environment of the agents, that may impose certain behaviours. We also define some properties of these mechanisms which will make it possible to prove certain characteristics of organised multiagent systems. Finally, we present a discussion about how the social concepts proposed by different organisational paradigms can be considered as either informative or regulative organisational mechanisms.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing
    March 2009
    2347 pages
    ISBN:9781605581668
    DOI:10.1145/1529282
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    Published: 08 March 2009

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    1. multiagent systems
    2. organisational mechanisms
    3. organisations

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