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 GORMAS: An Organizational-Oriented
Methodological Guideline for Open MAS

Estefanı́a Argente, Vicent Botti, and Vicente Julian

Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación

Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Camino de Vera s/n. 46022, Valencia, Spain
{eargente,vbotti,vinglada}@dsic.upv.es

Abstract. An Organizational-Oriented Methodological Guideline for

designing Virtual Organizations, focused on Service-Oriented Open
Multi-Agent Systems, is presented in this paper. This guideline covers the
requirement analysis, the structure design and the organization-dynamics
design steps, in which software designers mainly specify the services that
the system under study is requested to offer, the internal structure of
this system and the norms that control its behavior, taking into account
the specific features of open multi-agent systems.

Keywords: virtual organizations, multi-agent systems, methodology.

1 Introduction

In the last years, there have appeared different methods for designing open multi-
agent systems, in which heterogeneous agents with interested or selfish behaviors
might participate inside. These methods take an Organization-Centered Multi-
Agent Systems (OCMAS) [18] approach, so then developers focus on the orga-
nizational aspects of the society of agents, guiding the process of the system
development by means of organizations, norms, roles, etc. Relevant examples
of these methods are Agent-Group-Role (AGR) [18], Tropos [9], MOISE [22],
OMNI [37] (based on the E-Institutions [17] approach), PASSI [10], SODA [30]
and INGENIAS [35].
A key concept in OCMAS methodologies is the Virtual Organization (VO),
which represents a set of single entities and institutions that need to coordinate
resources and services across institutional boundaries [12, 3]. Thus, they are
open systems formed by the grouping and collaboration of heterogeneous entities
(that may be designed by different teams) and there is a separation between
form and function that requires defining how a behavior will take place. They
have been successfully employed as a paradigm for developing agent systems [4,
10]. Organizations allow modeling systems at a high level of abstraction. They
include the integration of organizational and individual perspectives and also
the dynamic adaptation of models to organizational and environmental changes
[7] by forming groups with visibility boundaries [10].

M.-P. Gleizes and J.J. Gomez-Sanz (Eds.): AOSE 2009, LNCS 6038, pp. 32–47, 2011.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
 GORMAS: An Organizational-Oriented Methodological Guideline 33

From an analysis of these OCMAS methodologies [4], several critical needs

have been identified: (i) a clear characterization of the VO focused not only on
describing its structure by means of roles and groups, but also on how this orga-
nization its related with its environment and how external entities are promoted
to enter inside and offer their services or make use of the organization services;
(ii) the employment of several design patterns of different types of organizational
structures, which describe the intrinsic relationships between the system entities
and can be lately reused in different problems; (iii) a normative regulation of the
employment of services that also promotes agents to work in a cooperative way;
and (iv) different guidelines for integrating the current OCMAS methodologies
in a complete MAS development process.
Regarding services, both Multi-Agent Systems and Service-Oriented Com-
puting Techniques1 try to deal with the same kind of environments formed by
loose-coupled, flexible, persistent and distributed tasks [28]. Web services might
be a valid solution when point-to-point integration of static-bound services is
needed, but they are clearly not good enough for working in a changing envi-
ronment, in which new services appear, have to be discovered and composed or
adapted to different ontologies. The nature of agents, as intelligent and flexible
entities with auto-organizational capabilities, facilitates automatic service dis-
covery and composition. By integrating these two technologies it is possible to
model autonomous and heterogeneous computational entities in dynamic and
open environments [27].
Following this integrating approach, the THOMAS proposal [8] provides a
multi-agent framework for the development of VOs with a service-oriented style.
THOMAS [8] is an open agent platform that employs a service-based approach
as the basic building blocks for creating a suitable platform for intelligent agents
grouped in VOs. It feeds on the FIPA architecture but extends its main compo-
nents (i.e. AMS and DF) into an Organization Management System (OMS) and
a Service Facilitator (SF), respectively. The SF [36] is a service manager that
registers services provided by external entities and facilitates service discovery
for potential clients. The OMS [13] is responsible for the management of VOs,
taking control of their underlying structure, the roles played by the agents inside
the organization and the norms that rule the system behavior.
An OCMAS method should be employed to facilitate the identification of
VOs and services of a specific problem to be implemented organization-oriented
platforms like THOMAS. In this paper, a methodological guideline for MAS
designing based on the Organization Theory [14,19] and the Service-Oriented
approach [16] has been defined, named GORMAS, which allows detailing all
services offered and required by a Virtual Organization, its internal structure,
functionality, normative restrictions and its environment.
Next, GORMAS, the organization-centered MAS methodological guideline
defined in this work is presented. In section 3, a brief discussion of the related
work is shown. Finally, conclusions are included in section 4.

1
http://www.oasis-open.org
34 E. Argente, V. Botti, and V. Julian

2 GORMAS
GORMAS (Guidelines for ORganizational Multi-Agent Systems) defines a set
of activities for the analysis and design of Virtual Organizations, including the
design of their organizational structure and their dynamics. With this method,
all services offered and required by the Virtual Organization are clearly defined,
as well as its internal structure and the norms that govern its behavior.
GORMAS is based on a specific method for designing human organizations
[31,32], which consists of diverse phases for analysis and design. These phases
have been appropriately transformed to the MAS field, this way to catch all
the requirements of the design of an organization from the agents’ perspective.
Thus, the methodological guidelines proposed in GORMAS cover the typical re-
quirement analysis, architectural and detailed designs of many relevant OOMAS
methodologies, but it also includes a deeper analysis of the system as an open
organization that provides and offers services to its environment.
The proposed guideline allows being integrated into a development process
of complete software, which may include the phases of analysis, design, imple-
mentation, installation and maintenance of MAS. In this paper, we mainly focus
on the analysis and design processes (Figure 1a), which are split into: mission
and service analysis steps (analysis phase); and organizational and organization-
dynamics design steps (design phase). Implementation is carried out in the
THOMAS framework [8] which mostly covers the organization software com-
ponents that are required, such as organizational unit life-cycle management,
service searching and composition and norm management.
GORMAS adopts a Virtual Organization Model [11], formalized in a set of six
models [5]: (i) organizational, which describes the entities of the system (agents,
organizational units, roles, norms, resources, applications) and how they are re-
lated between them (social relationships); (ii) activity, which details the specific
functionality of the system, on the basis of services, tasks and goals; (iii) in-
teraction, which defines the interactions of the system, activated by the pursuit
of goals and the execution of services; (iv) environment, which describes the
resources and applications of the system, the agent perceptions and actions on
their environment and the invocation of services through their ports; (v) agent,
which describes the concrete agents and their responsibilities; and (vi) norma-
tive, which details the norms of the organization and the normative goals that
agents must follow, including sanctions and rewards.
This Virtual Organization Model employs the Organizational Unit (OU) con-
cept to represent an agent organization. An OU is composed of a group of entities
(agents or OUs) that carry out some specific and differentiated tasks, following a
pattern of cooperation and communication controlled by norms[6,5]. The OU is
seen as a single entity at analysis and design phases, thus it can pursue goals, of-
fer and request services, publish its requirements of services for allowing external
agents to enter inside, and even play a specific role inside other units.
Due to lack of space, a general view of the different activities that integrate
the proposed methodological guideline is only described in this paper. These
 GORMAS: An Organizational-Oriented Methodological Guideline 35

Mission Analysis

[no]

Service Analysis Environment

[Is the problem well specified?] Conditions
Designer Organizational
Dimensions
[no] Mission Analysis
[yes]

Organization
Mission Model
Organizational Organization
Organizational Design Design Pattern Designs
Stakeholders
[Is the organization of the system
well defined?]

[no] [yes] Activity Model

Normative
Organization Model
Service Analysis Dynamics Design
Organization Dynamics Design
Environment
[Are the dynamics of the system Model
well specified?] Interaction
Service /Product
Description Model
Standardization
Technology Mechanisms Agent Model
[yes]
Reward System
Policies

a) b)

Fig. 1. a) GORMAS Activity Diagram; b) GORMAS Activity Detail Diagram

activities are defined with SPEM 2.02 , which is an OMG standard meta-model
for formally defining software and system development processes. Moreover,
GORMAS activities include several supporting documents and templates for
enabling the identification and description of the elements of the system [1],
such as templates for identifying the system functionality and describing ser-
vice conditions, consumer/producer goals and quality requirements. Figure 1b
details all specific guidances, models and work products that each activity needs
or produces.

2.1 Mission Analysis

This first activity (Figure 2a) implies the analysis of the system requirements,
identifying the use cases, the stakeholders and the global goals of the system.
More concretely, it is defined:
– The global goals of the system (mission).
– The services and products that the system provides to other entities.
– The stakeholders with whom the system contacts (clients or suppliers of
resources/services), describing their needs and requirements.
– The conditions of the environment or context in which the organization exists
(i.e. complexity, diversity, etc.).
As a result, a diagram of the organizational model is drawn, detailing the prod-
ucts and services offered by the system, the global goals (mission) pursued, the
stakeholders and the existing links between them, the system results as well as
the resources or services needed.
2
http://www.omg.org/spc/SPEM/2.0/PDF