A Goal-Based Organizational Perspective on Multi-agent Architectures

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve particular, possible common goals. Considering real world organizations as an analogy, this paper proposes architectural styles for MAS which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances literature. The styles are modeled using the i* framework which offers the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency and specified as metaconcepts in Telos. Each style is evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability or adaptability. A macro level defines these organizational styles and a micro level refers to patterns coming from the agent community. These patterns will define how goals assigned to actors of an organizational architecture will be fulfilled by agents. An e-business example illustrates our purposes. The research is conducted in the context of Tropos, a comprehensive software system development methodology.