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Defining Virtual Organizations Following
a Formal Approach
Sergio Esparcia and Estefanıa Argente
Grupo de Tecnologıa Informatica - Inteligencia Artificial
Departamento de Sistemas Informaticos y Computaci on
Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n - 46022, Valencia, Spain
{sesparcia,eargente}@dsic.upv.es
Abstract.
One of the main approaches to define a Virtual Organization, which
is a concrete type of Organization Centered Multi-Agent System, is to follow a
formal approach. Using a formalization involves introducing mathematical and
logical concepts. In this paper, we present a formalization for Virtual Organi-
zations, named Virtual Organization Formalization, which allows defining this
kind of systems organized by means of the Organizational Dimensions, extracted
after studying the human organization theory, where entities are distributed by
the functionality they are providing to the Virtual Organization. Additionally, this
work studies different proposals that are aimed to formally define an Organization
Centered Multi-Agent System, comparing them with our own proposal.
Keywords:
Virtual organizations, Formalization, Multi-agent systems.
1
Introduction
During the last years, different trends to develop Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have
been appeared. One of the most important approaches is the organizational approach.
Organizations describe system functionality, structure, environment and dynamics. In
Organization Centered MAS (OCMAS), the organization exists as an explicit entity of
the system [1], defined by its designers following a top-down approach. In OCMAS,
agents are aware of the organization in which they are participating and they are pro-
vided with a representation of it. Agents can use this knowledge to reason about it and
to establish relationships and interactions to reach their objectives.
OCMAS can be defined and described by means of a formal approach. To formalize
them it is necessary to introduce concepts taken from mathematical and logic theories,
such as LAO [2], whose syntax to define a system follows the temporal logic language
CTL [3]. Other proposals not only provide a formal way to define an OCMAS, but
also a language to describe it, such as the proposal by Grossi
et al.
[4], which em-
ploys a multimodal propositional logic language to model agent organizations, based
on Kripke models. Formal approaches are very useful in order to obtain a clear defi-
nition of OCMAS, improving the study and analysis of the different issues regarding
them. Additionally, these formalizations are commonly used to check the correctness
and integrity of an OCMAS, by means of techniques like model checking [5].
