GORMAS: A Methodological Guideline for Organizational-Oriented Open MAS

1 Introduction GORMAS (Guidelines for ORganizational Multi-Agent Systems) defines a set of activities for the analysis and design of Virtual Organizations, including the design of their organizational structure and their dynamics. With this method, all services offered and required by the Virtual Organization are clearly defined, as well as its internal structure and the norms that govern its behavior. GORMAS is based on a specific method for designing human organizations, which consists of diverse phases for analysis and design. These phases have been appropriately adapted to the MAS field, this way to catch all the requirements of the design of an organization from the agents' perspective. Thus, the methodological guidelines proposed in GORMAS cover the typical requirement analysis, architectural and detailed designs of many relevant Organization-Centered Multi-Agent Systems (OCMAS) [1], (such as PASSI [2], SODA [3], AGR [4] and INGENIAS [5]) methodologies, but it also includes a deeper analysis of the system as an open organization that provides and offers services to its environment. The proposed guideline allows being integrated into a development process of complete software, which may include the phases of analysis, design, implementation, installation and maintenance of MAS. GORMAS methodology is focused on the analysis and design processes, which are split into: mission and service analysis steps (analysis phase); and organizational and organization dynamics design steps (design phase). Implementation is carried out in the THOMAS [6] framework which mostly covers the organization software components that are required, such as organizational unit life-cycle management, service searching and composition and norm management. This methodology is specified in order to design large scale, open and service-oriented MAS, where organizations are able to accept external agents into them. In order to model this kind of systems, GORMAS is supported by a CASE tool named EMFGormas [7], that uses the MDA Eclipse Technology. This technology requires defining a platform independent unified meta-model that describes the modeling language in a formal way, establishing the primitives and syntactic-semantic properties of organizations and multi-agent system. The tool offers several graphical editors, one for each view of the model, but diagrams are stored in a unique model. GORMAS is composed of four phases (see fig. 1), covering the analysis and design of a MAS: first activity is mission analysis, a phase that implies the analysis of the system requirements, the use cases, the stakeholders and the global goals of the system; the service analysis phase specifies …