A Logic of Agent Organizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generic formal model for agent organizations that integrates various organizational aspects, enabling high-level analysis of structures, activities, and environments in multi-agent systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel, high-level formal framework that unifies different organizational concepts for analyzing multi-agent systems.

Findings

Provides a formal model for specifying organizational structures and actions.

Enables analysis of organizations at a high level of abstraction.

Simplifies complex aspects to manage formalism complexity.

Abstract

Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve global (or organizational) objectives by more or less autonomous agents. In order to develop a theory on the relation between organizational structures, organizational objectives and the actions of agents fulfilling roles in the organization a theoretical framework is needed to describe organizational structures and actions of (groups of) agents. Current logical formalisms focus on specific aspects of organizations (e.g. power, delegation, agent actions, or normative issues) but a framework that integrates and relates different aspects is missing. Given the amount of aspects involved and the subsequent complexity of a formalism encompassing them all, it is difficult to realize. In this paper, a first step is taken to solve this problem. We present a generic formal model that enables to specify and relate the main concepts of an organization (including, activity, structure, environment and others) so that organizations can be analyzed at a high level of abstraction. However, for some aspects we use a simplified model in order to avoid the complexity of combining many different types of (modal) operators.