Organisational artifacts and agents for open multi-agent organisations: "giving the power back to the agents''

The social and organisational aspects of agency have have become nowadays a major focus of interest in the MAS community, and a good amount of theoretical work is available, in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of proper organisational infrastructures embodying such models and theories is still an open issue, in particular when open MAS are considered. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss a model for an organisational infrastructure called ORA4MAS that aims at addressing these issues. By being based on the A&A (Agents and Artifacts) meta-model, the key and novel aspect introduced with ORA4MAS is that organisations and the organisation infrastructure itself are conceived in terms of agents and artifacts, as first-class basic abstractions giving body to the MAS from design to runtime. This is in analogy with human organization and organization infrastructures, that are populated by humans (as participants and part of the organisation machinery), and by rich sets of artifacts and tools that humans use to support their activities inside the organisation and the organisation itself, encapsulating essential infrastructure services.