A logic for agent organizations

Abstract

Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve common goals for more or less autonomous agents. In order to develop a theory on the relation between organizational structures, organizational actions and actions of agents performing roles in the organization we need a theoretical framework to describe and reason about organizations. The formal model presented in this paper is sufficiently generic to enable the comparison of different existing organizational approaches to MAS, while having enough descriptive power to describe realistic organizations.