A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper presents a generic meta-model of multi-agent systems based on organizational concepts such as groups, roles and structures. This model, called AALAADIN, defines a very simple description of coordination and negotiation schemes through multi-agent systems. Aalaadin is a meta-model of artificial organization by which one can build multi-agent systems with different forms of organizations such as market-like and hierarchical organizations. We show that this meta-model allows for agent heterogeneity in languages, applications and architectures. We also introduce the concept of organizational reflection which uses the same conceptual model to describe system level tasks such as remote communication and migration of agents. Finally, we briefly describe a platform, called MADKIT, based on this model. It relies on a minimal agent kernel with platform-level services implemented as agents, groups and roles.