Multi-Agent Architectures for E-Business Information Systems: An Organizational Perspective

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 MAS architectural patterns for information systems which adopt concepts from organizational theories. The patterns are modeled using the i* framework which offers the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency and specified in Formal Tropos and evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability or adaptability. We conduct a comparison of organizational and conventional software architectures using an e-business information system case study. Theme: Architecture, Systems and Infrastructure