A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems

This paper presents a generic meta-model of multi-agent systems based on organizational concepts such as groups, roles and structures. This model, called AALAADIN, defines a very simple description of coordination and negotiation schemes through multi-agent systems. Aalaadin is a meta-model of artificial organization by which one can build multi-agent systems with different forms of organizations such as market-like and hierarchical organizations. We show that this meta-model allows for agent heterogeneity in languages, applications and architectures. We also introduce the concept of organizational reflection which uses the same conceptual model to describe system-level tasks such as remote communication and migration of agents. Finally, we briefly describe a platform, called MADKIT, based on this model. It relies on a minimal agent kernel with platform-level services implemented as agents, groups and roles.