Defining Virtual Organizations Following a Formal Approach - Agents and Artificial Intelligence - page 362

The Dynamical Dimension specifies how the organization evolves through time, de-
tailing the way in which agents enter and leave it, how they adopt certain roles according
to their capabilities and abilities, and how they can participate in the units or groups of
the organization where they are admitted. This dimension also details the interactions
that take place between internal and external entities.
The Environment Dimension describes how agents are connected with other types
of entities such as artifacts, applications or resources; and how agents can perceive and
act on the environment.
Finally, the Normative Dimension determines the set of defined actions and rules
to manage the behavior of the members of the organization. Norms are widely used to
limit the autonomy inside societies and to solve coordination problems, especially when
it is not possible to exercise a total social control.

3 Related Work

Based on different logics and formal methods, some proposals to model OCMAS have
been defined, each giving its particular vision and adapting its formalization to the spe-
cific kind of system that they are looking to build. In this section, a set of relevant
proposals on this field has been reviewed: OperA [10], LAO [2], Process-Oriented Mod-
eling Framework (POMF) [11], MOISE Inst [12], MACODO [13], PopOrg [14] and the
proposals by Grossi et al. [4] and Jonker et al. [15]. All these proposals are analyzed fol-
lowing the Organizational Dimensions described in section 2, in order to check whether
they are taking into account the entities and concepts from each dimension.
Table 1 compares these proposals, analyzing the organizational elements that they
take into account. Next, we will depict in detail the contents of this table, describing
each studied proposal.
OperA proposes an Organizational Model to describe organizations that defines the
social, normative, interaction and communicative structures of the society. The Social
Structure of OperA is related to the Structural Dimension, since it contains roles, groups
and dependency relations between roles. Also, its Social Structure is related to the Func-
tional Dimension since it takes into account the objectives associated with roles. The
Normative Structure is obviously related to the Normative Dimension, as both consider
norms. The Interaction Structure models the activity of the system, which is considered
as the dynamics taken from the Dynamical Dimension. Finally, the Communicative
Structure manages communication between agents, like interactions in the Dynamical
Dimension. Nevertheless, OperA does not model the environment.
MOISE Inst is composed of four specifications, distributed in a similar way that the
Organizational Dimensions are. The Structural Specification (SS) defines the roles that
agents will play, including the relations between them, and an additional structural level
named group, where roles belong to and interactions are carried out. The SS contains el-
ements from the Structural Dimension, but it does not model the topology of the system.
The Functional Specification (FS), related to the Functional Dimension, only defines the
goals that the system must achieve. The Contextual Specification (CS) defines the dif-
ferent contexts that influence the organizational dynamics and the transitions between