Defining Virtual Organizations Following a Formal Approach

Abstract

One of the main approaches to define a Virtual Organization, which is a concrete type of Organization Centered Multi-Agent System, is to follow a formal approach. Using a formalization involves introducing mathematical and logical concepts. In this paper, we present a formalization for Virtual Organizations, named Virtual Organization Formalization, which allows defining this kind of systems organized by means of the Organizational Dimensions, extracted after studying the human organization theory, where entities are distributed by the functionality they are providing to the Virtual Organization. Additionally, this work studies different proposals that are aimed to formally define an Organization Centered Multi-Agent System, comparing them with our own proposal. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.