Abstract
Inter-organizational collaboration often occurs in complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. Regulating structures should be represented explicitly and independently from the acting components at different levels of abstraction in order for stakeholders to be able to analyze the overall setup and decide on their participation. This paper proposes a framework for describing collaboration relationships in inter-organizational partnerships. The framework is based on the OperA model for multi-agent organizations and provides a specification dimension which describes what objectives to achieve from the designer’s perspective based on the concept of organization, role and role dependency, and an enactment dimension which represents the agents and their role enacting relationships to describe who achieves what objectives from an implementation perspective. The adoption of composite roles and composite agents facilitates a modeling of nested organizations, which offers a suitable way to manage/regulate inter-organizational interactions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aldewereld, H., Dignum, V.: OperettA: Organization-Oriented Development Environment. In: Dastani, M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Hübner, J., Leite, J. (eds.) LADS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6822, pp. 1–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Brazier, F.M.T., Dunin-Keplicz, B.M., Jennings, N.R., Treur, J.: Desire: Modelling multi-agent systems in a compositional formal framework. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 6, 67–94 (1997)
Brazier, F.M.T., Jonker, C.M., Treur, J.: Principles of compositional multi-agent system development. In: Proceedings of the 15th IFIP World Computer Congress, WCC 1998, Conference on Information Technology and Knowledge Systems, IT and KNOWS 1998 (1998)
Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., Mylopoulos, J.: Tropos: An agent-oriented software development methodology. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 8, 203–236 (2004)
van den Broek, E.L., Jonker, C.M., Sharpanskykh, A., Treur, J., Yolum, P.: Formal Modeling and Analysis of Organizations. In: Boissier, O., Padget, J., Dignum, V., Lindemann, G., Matson, E., Ossowski, S., Sichman, J.S., Vázquez-Salceda, J. (eds.) ANIREM 2005 and OOOP 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3913, pp. 18–34. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Cossentino, M., Gaud, N., Hilaire, V., Galland, S., Koukam, A.: Aspecs: an agent-oriented software process for engineering complex systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 20, 260–304 (2010)
Dalpiaz, F., Ali, R., Asnar, Y., Bryl, V., Giorgini, P.: Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration. In: Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Objects and Agents, WOA 2008 (2008)
Dam, K.H.V.: Capturing socio-technical systems with agent-based modelling. TU Delft, PhD Thesis (2009)
DeLoach, S.A.: The mase methodology. In: Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: The Agent-oriented Software Engineering Handbook (2004)
Dignum, M.V.: A model for organizational interaction: based on agents, founded in logic. Utrecht University, PhD Thesis (2004)
Hubner, J.F., Sichman, J.S., Boissier, O.: Moise+: towards a structural, functional, and deontic model for mas organization. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2002 (2002)
Jiang, J., Aldewereld, H., Dignum, M.V., Tan, Y.: A context-aware normative structure in mas. In: Proceedings of AAMAS (2012)
Juan, T., Pierce, A., Sterling, L.: Roadmap: Extending the gaia methodology for complex open systems. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2002 (2002)
Nikolic, I.: Co-Evolutionary Method For Modelling Large Scale Socio-Technical Systems Evolution. TU Delft, PhD Thesis (2009)
Odell, J., Nodine, M., Levy, R.: A Metamodel for Agents, Roles, and Groups. In: Odell, J., Giorgini, P., Müller, J.P. (eds.) AOSE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3382, pp. 78–92. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Pavón, J., Gómez-Sanz, J.J., Fuentes, R.: The ingenias methodology and tools. In: Agent-oriented Methodologies (2005)
Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M.: Multi-agent systems as computational organizations: The gaia methodology. In: Agent-oriented Methodologies (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jiang, J., Dignum, V., Tan, YH. (2012). An Agent-Based Inter-organizational Collaboration Framework: OperA+. In: Cranefield, S., van Riemsdijk, M.B., Vázquez-Salceda, J., Noriega, P. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent System VII. COIN 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7254. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35545-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35545-5_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35544-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35545-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)