Towards a formal conceptualization of organizational design techniques for large scale multi agent systems

Computing in the Internet of Things is increasingly pervasive, with everyday items including clothes, smart-phones, cars and various household appliances gaining sophisticated communication and computing capacities. It seems to be just a matter of time before devices have to collaborate and compete mutually as well as with their users, in order to provide better services to mankind. These embedded computers are increasingly autonomous and connected, and can thus be modeled as agents within multi-agent systems (MAS). Only 30 years ago it was science fiction that over a billion of people will exchange billions of emails on a daily basis. Today a scenario of millions of collaborating agents embedded in gadgets and appliances, across various networks may also sound futuristic. However given the current rate of development in electronics, we will soon have to manage large scale MAS (LSMAS) where millions of agents exist, collaborate and compete with each other. While a recent study shows that there are at least 50 organizational structure, superstructure and architecture types employed in modern organizations, there is a lack of research that would apply organizational design methods to organizations composed entirely of agents and agent systems in order to achieve alignment of organizational structure, processes, and reward system with the goals and strategy of the organization. Our research is therefore aimed towards enriching formal design methods for the development of LSMAS to foster the development of self-organizing and adaptable networks of devices that will contribute towards a sustainable development of the information society. In this work-in-progress study we apply a collaborative semantic wiki approach towards formalizing organizational design techniques in order to provide a foundation for future studies of automated LSMAS development. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of SysInt 2014.