An Agent-Based Organizational Model for Cooperative Information Gathering

Organization modeling is recognized as an essential mechanism for structuring the design of Multi-Agent Systems and coordinating their executions. In this paper, an organizational model for Cooperative Information Gathering Systems (CIGS) is proposed. This model has three levels of abstraction, starting with a general system description and progressively transformed onto a concrete organization. This model is organized around reusable and conceptual basic bricks corresponding to roles and protocols. The roles and their participations in the protocols are defined according to a deontic structure inspired from the GAIA methodology, but specified formally using Petri Nets with Objects. The originalities and the advantages of our proposal are i) the definition of an organizational model adapted to the CIG ii) a formalization of the roles, which makes it possible to analyze and simulate them before their deployment iii) the possibility to reuse the components of the model.