Controlling multi-party interaction within normative multi-agent organizations

Abstract

Multi-party communications taking place within organizations lead to different interaction modes such as (in)direct communication between roles, (in)direct communication restricted to a group, etc. Fully normative organisations need to regulate and control those modes as they do for agents' behaviors. However, this problem is not well addressed in current organisation model proposals. This paper proposes thus to extend the normative organization model oise in order to specify such interaction modes. This specification has two purposes: (i) to make the multi-agent organization able to monitor the interaction between the agents, (ii) to make the agents able to reason on these modes as they can do on norms. The paper is focused on the first point. We illustrate with a crisis management application how this extension enlarges the scope of expression of the interaction capabilities and how it has been implemented on the Easi interaction model. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.