Dimensions of Organizational Coordination

Abstract

It is hard, if not impossible, to assume anything about agents’ behavior in a society with heterogeneous agents from different sources. Organizations are used to restrict and guide the agents’ actions such that the global objectives of the society are achieved. We discuss how agents can be supported to include organizational objectives and constraints into their reasoning processes by considering two alternatives: agent reasoning and middleware regulation. We show how agents can use an organizational specification to achieve organizational objectives by delegating and coordinating their activities with other agents in the society, using the GOAL agent programming language and the OperA organizational model.