Organizational and Social Concepts in Agent Oriented Software Engineering

AOSE methodologies and models borrow various abstractions and concepts from the organization and sociology disciplines. Although they all view multi-agent system as organized society, the organizational abstractions, assumptions, concepts, and models in them are actually used in different ways. It is, therefore desirable to have a systematic way of analyzing and comparing the organizational and social concepts in AOSE. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we describe and define the modeling construct levels and the social premises of multi-agent system that should be modeled and analyzed when developing multi-agent system, identify and classify categories of organizational and social concepts in AOSE literature that are used to deal with them from standpoints of organization abstractions. Secondly, we analyze some methodologies and models in AOSE, explain how the organizational and social concepts are used to specify and analyze multi-agent system with various social premises in different levels.