SonarEditor: A Tool for Multi-Agent-Organizations Modelling

This paper presents the SonarEditor, which supports the creation of Sonar models. It provides pre-build net components, a wellformedness check and a wizard that aims at the support for possible enhancements of the model. SonarEditor [1] is a prototypical implementation that enables multi-agent system developers to model organizational models following the Sonar formalism. It is implemented as plugin for Renew [3]. The SonarEditor consists of three parts: pre-build net components [2], which help to create models, a well-formedness check that can check the well-formedness of the model and a wizard that can be used to enchance the model. Well-formedness of a model is defined by the definition of an organization and that the model is acyclic [4, Section 3.1]. Sonar is an approach to model organizations based on Petri nets. Such a model is composed of a delegation net and a set of distributed workflow nets (DWFs). The DWFs model the real workflows and the delegation net all possible courses of actions in an organization. The SonarEditor focuses on the delegation net, which is a Petri net (P, T, F ) with P a set of Tasks, T a set of Implementations and F a set of arcs between P and T . Every Task and Implementation has to be assigned to a Position. This Position models a position in the organization. A Task models a task, which has to be executed. The Implementations define how every Position can implement each task. There are four different types of Implementations allowed by formal definition of the delegation net. The four types are named execute, delegate, split, refine and the pre-build net components for them are presented in the bottom of Figure 1. The top of Figure 1 displays the toolbar of the Sonar net components. There are from left to right Position, Initial Task, Task, execute, delegate, split, refine, refine+split. These are the net components for the delegation net. refine+split is the combination of the Implementations refine and split. The next components Declaration Node, Role and DWFAction are the components for creating DWFs. The last three buttons trigger the well-formedness check and the wizard: the first two trigger the well-formedness check with and without DWFs, the last triggers the wizard. The SonarEditor shows an error frame if errors occur while checking the wellformedness. This frame contains a list of these errors and three buttons: Select, Select All and Cancel. If an error item is selected in the error frame the button Select can be pushed to select the corresponding element in the delegation net. With the button Select All all elements causing errors will be selected.