Organizations and Autonomous Agents: Bottom-Up Dynamics of Coordination Mechanisms

Agents in an organization need to coordinate their actions in order to reach the organizational goals. Organizational models specify the desired behaviour in terms of roles, relations, norms and interactions. In this research, we show how organizational rules can be adopted by autonomous agents. We have developed a method to translate norms into reasoning rules for agents. However, since the agents are autonomous they will have their own reasoning rules next to the organizational rules. We propose a modular reasoning model to make organizational rules explicit. This allows for meta-reasoning about these rules. We show that this stimulates bottom-up dynamics in the organization.