A Framework for Organization-Aware Agents

Open systems are characterized by the presence of a diversity of heterogeneous and autonomous agents that act according to private goals. Organizations, such as those used in real-life to structure human activities such as task allocation, coordination and supervision, can regulate the agents’ behavior space and describe the expected behavior of the agents.

Assuming an open environment, where agents are developed independently of the Organizational structures, agents need to be able to reason about the structure, so that they can deliberate about their actions and act within the expected boundaries and work towards the objectives of the organization. In this paper, we present the AORTA reasoning framework and show how it can be integrated into typical BDI-agents.

We provide operational semantics that enables agents to make organizational decisions in order to coordinate and cooperate without explicit coordination mechanisms within the agents. The organizational model is independent of that of the agents, and the approach is not tied to a specific organizational model, but uses an organizational metamodel.

We show how AORTA helps agents work together in a system with an organization for choosing the best tender for a building project.