Exploiting the Overlapping of Higher Order: Entities within Multi-Agent Systems

Currently multi-agent systems (MAS, sometimes MASs) are receiving great attention as a promising approach for modeling, designing, and developing complex, decentralized and large-scale software systems. The captivating characteristics they provide such as decentralization, dynamic reorganization, self-organization, emergence, autonomy, etc., make them a perfect solution for handling current software systems challenges specially their unpredictable and highly changing working environments. Organization-centered MAS (OCMAS) are concerned with the modeling of MAS using higher order abstraction entities than individual agents. Organizational models are the key tool to develop OCMAS; they are currently an important part of most agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. This paper proposes a novel organizational model called NOSHAPE. It exploits the overlapping relationships among higher order abstraction entities such as organizations of agents, worlds of organizations, and even universes of worlds within MAS to realize and utilize their captivating characteristics. The NOSHAPE model is informally and semi-formally described and its applicability is demonstrated with a case study.