Understanding the social contexts in which actions and interactions take place is of utmost importance for planning one’s goals and activities. People use social practices as means to make sense of their environment, assessing how that context relates to past, common experiences, culture and capabilities. Social practices can therefore simplify deliberation and planning in complex contexts. In the context of patient-centered planning, hospitals seek means to ensure that patients and their families are at the center of decisions and planning of the healthcare processes. This requires on one hand that patients are aware of the practices being in place at the hospital and on the other hand that hospitals have the means to evaluate and adapt current practices to the needs of the patients. In this paper we apply a framework for formalizing social practices of an organization to an emergency department that carries out patient-centered planning. We indicate how such a formalization can be used to answer operational queries about the expected outcome of operational actions.@en

This short paper introduces and summarizes the AORTA reasoning framework that can be integrated into BDI-agents to enable organizational decision-making. This work has recently been published in the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS), as [3].@en

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.@en

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.@en