MAS Organisation within a Coordination Infrastructure: Experiments in TuCSoN

Organisation and coordination are strictly related issues in the engineering of agent societies, and some important issues such as security can be suitable modelled only considering their synergy. Accordingly, in this paper we show how to extend a MAS coordination infrastructure for agent-based systems (namely, TuCSoN) toward the specification and support of MAS organisation. To this end, we adopt the notion of agent coordination context (ACC) as a first-class abstraction that defines the organisation structures and rules, and makes them accessible and manageable at execution time. Then, we show how ACC provides the conceptual framework to model the presence of an agent inside the organisation and the environment, as well as the means to face MAS organisation, coordination, and even security issues in a coherent and uniform way.