Research On Organizational Relationships Of Multi-Agent System

Multi-Agent System (MAS) are rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for developing complex systems. So far there are dozens of agent-oriented methodologies to support analysis and design of MAS. Recently, many methodologies and languages use the organizational abstractions to model MAS. They borrow the concepts from the organization and sociology disciplines in order to understand, analyze and describe MAS.Organizational relationship is an important organizational abstraction. It describes the organizational structure in a natural way. However, there are few efforts to define the organizational relationships in detail. This paper identifies and classifies a number of organizational relationships from diverse viewpoints.Their semantics are defined in a semi-formal way based on the role model that we present. We especially analyze the inheritance relationship in MAS and argue the importance and necessity to specify and model the inheritance in developing MAS. The mechanism of inheritance is defined by the role model that we present. We also present a method to model and analyze the role inheritance in requirement analysis phase. Lastly, we develop a modeling tool to support developers to specify and analyze the organizational relationships.These efforts are benefit to specifying the organizational structure and analyzing the structure hierarchy of MAS. They are also helpful to model MAS and facilitate software reuse.