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to agents by other agents, so this is a type of interaction from the Dynamical Dimen-
sion. Since this proposal is focused on modeling the organization structure, it does not
take into account the Environment Dimension.
Finally, Jonker
et al.
defined a framework for modeling and providing a formal anal-
ysis of organizations, based on a generic representation of them by means of a set of
roles. Apart from the roles, this proposal also formalizes two concepts from the Struc-
tural Dimension: agents and relations between roles. These relations enable the inter-
actions from the Dynamical Dimension, which is completed by taking into account the
dynamics of the organization. One of the main advantages of this work is that it is able
to explicitly model the environment of the Environment Dimension, although it does
not model environmental resources. The main lack of this formalization is that it does
not formalize any concept from the Functional and Normative Dimensions, so designers
are not able to model concepts such as objectives and norms.
Generally, all the analyzed formalizations present a good approach to define an orga-
nization in a formal way. Nevertheless, none of the proposals take into account all enti-
ties taken from Organizational Dimensions, but these formalizations propose different
ways to structure an OCMAS. Thus, it seems interesting to be provided with an explicit
description of the Organizational Dimensions, which are useful for representing orga-
nizational elements. Therefore, in section 4 our proposal to model organizations will be
presented, which models an organization clearly defining its dimensions. This proposal
also integrates some features taken from some proposals presented in this section.
4
Formal Description of a Virtual Organization
In this section the concept of Virtual Organization (VO) will be defined in a formal
way, taking into account its organizational dimensions. This formalization, named VOF
(
Virtual Organization Formalization
), will be focused on three elements: (i) the Orga-
nizational Specification (
OS
), which details the set of elements that specify the orga-
nization; (ii) the
Organizational Entity
(
OE
), which represents the instantiation of the
elements in
OS
; and (iii) the
Organizational Dynamics
(
φ
), which relates elements from
OS
with elements from
OE
.
Definition 1
.
A Virtual Organization is defined, at a given time t, as a tuple O
t
=
OS
t
,
OE
t
,
t
φ
where:
-
OS
refers
to
the
Organizational
Specification.
It
is
defined
as
OS
=
SD
,
FD
,
ED
,
ND
where:
•
SD is the Structural Dimension.
•
FD is the Functional Dimension.
•
ED is the Environment Dimension.
ND is the Normative Dimension.
-
OE refers to the Organizational Entity, which represents the dynamic elements of
the system.
•
-
φ
allows to relate OS with OE, thus defining the Dynamic Dimension, together with
the OE.
