Formalising Multi-Agent Organisations

Agent oriented software engineering is seen as the approach taken object oriented approaches one step ahead. The design of agent systems is based on three fundamental perspectives: the functional, the interactional and the organisational perspective. The organisation perspective becomes a central design issue if the number of agents is large or the environment is unstable. While the functional perspective is well founded in the planning theory of artificial intelligence and the interaction perspective is rooted in the theory of speech-acts and formal ontologies, the organisational perspective is still an active research area with several open questions. In this paper we define a formal organisation model for agent systems based on Petri nets and show how agent oriented software engineering can benefit from this model.