Multi-Agent Architectures as Organizational Structures

A Multi-Agent System (hereafter MAS) is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve common goals. Considering real world organizations as an metaphor, this paper proposes architectural styles for MAS which adopt concepts from organizational theories. The styles are modeled in i*/Tropos, using the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency and are intended to capture needs/wants, delegations and obligations. The proposed architectural styles are evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability and adaptability. In addition, we report on a comparative study of organizational and conventional software architectures using a mobile robot control example from the Software Engineering literature. The research reported here was conducted within the scope of the Tropos project, whose objective is to develop a comprehensive agent-oriented software development methodology.