Multi-Agent System Research Map

Social Structures

Agents are social entities in the sense that they are often situated in an environment with other agents. In order to fulfil its goals an agent frequently has to delegate tasks to other agents, because it has not all the needed capabilities to reach the goal solely by itself.

Therefore the social structures in which an agent resides are important for the workflows in the whole multi-agent system (MAS). Different approaches for describing the social structures in a MAS exist. Ferber et al. propose an organizational model based on the notions of agent, group and role and independent of the internal agent structure. Other approaches like joint intentions and shared plans require special intra-agent concepts.

Social structures for agent systems can be regarded at different levels of abstraction. Additionally the approaches can either be independent of the internal agent structures or rely on them. Ferber et al. [FeGu98][FGJ+01] propose an organizational view introducing the notions of role, group and agent. It is shown how the concepts are interrelated and can be used to describe an organization independent from the underlying internal agent architecture. The concept is implemented in the open-source agent platform MadKit.
The JACK Team Model is based on the notions of role, team, teamdata and teamplan. The concepts are directly incorporated into the BDI paradigm and allow establishing teams dynamically. These teams then try to accomplish a goal in teamwork [...].

[FeGu98]	J. Ferber, O. Gutknecht. A Meta-Model for the Analysis and Design of Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS98).
[FGJ+01]	J. Ferber, O. Gutknecht, C. M. Jonker, J.-P. Müller, J. Treur. Organization Models and Behavioural Requirements Specification for Multi-Agent Systems. MAAMAW, 2001.