16 W.H. Oyenan, S.A. DeLoach, and G.

Singh

We are currently working on extending the O-MaSE process framework [10]

and the agentTool (aT3 ) development environment [4] to support the systematic
design of OMAS by using our compositional approach. We are also interested in
offline exploration of alternative designs created using different service providers
and verifying them for robustness, flexibility and efficiency. Having predictive
data on the quality of alternate designs will help designers choose the best service
providers for their applications.

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 A Formal Specification for
Organizational Adaptation

Huib Aldewereld, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, and Loris Penserini

Institute of Information and Computing Sciences

Universiteit Utrecht - P.O. Box 80089, 3508 TB Utrecht - The Netherlands
{huib,dignum,virginia,loris}@cs.uu.nl

Abstract. Agent organizations are a good means to guarantee certain system ob-
jectives in the context of autonomous, self adapting agents. However, in highly
dynamic environments such as in crisis management where different organiza-
tions have to cooperate flexibly and efficiently, the organizational structure itself
should also be adaptable to the circumstances. In this paper we distinguish differ-
ent types of context changes and the way organizations can adapt to such changes.
We give a formal description —of both organizations and the changes— which
facilitates proving that certain features remain stable throughout the life cycle of
the organization or are justifiable changes.

1 Introduction

Software system development for complex applications requires approaches that take
into account organizational and social issues, such as control, dependencies and struc-
tural changes. Often, the agent paradigm is proposed for these situations [2,18,11,15].
Nevertheless, typical agent-oriented software engineering approaches are often not well
suited to deal with organizational changes and the resulting need for adaptation. Adap-
tation issues are often ignored, only treated implicitly, or require complete (offline) sys-
tem redesign. In particular, only a few methodologies have considered organizational
and social abstractions as key architectural and coordination requirements for multi-
agent systems (MAS), e.g., see [2,18,15].
Following the idea of autonomic computing publicized by IBM [8,12], recent soft-
ware engineering approaches have focused on the design of single (agent-based) sys-
tems with the ability to cope with context changes. However, in complex domains,
adaptation can be easier and better studied and handled at an organizational level of ab-
straction [10]. In this paper, we propose ways to deal with the challenge of adaptation
at the organizational level within a software development framework.
The work reported in this paper is part of the general development framework within
the European FP7 project ALIVE . As illustration, we adopt a simplified version from
the Crisis Management case studied in ALIVE. Due to the high variability of social
dependencies and responsibilities among roles, these scenarios are very suitable to study
adaptation to context changes.
We use the OperA framework [2,14] that provides social abstractions to study and
design organizations of agent societies. The OperA model includes three components:

M.-P. Gleizes and J.J. Gomez-Sanz (Eds.): AOSE 2009, LNCS 6038, pp. 18–31, 2011.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
 A Formal Specification for Organizational Adaptation 19

the organizational model, the social model, and the interaction model. This paper fo-
cuses on structural adaptation to context changes, using the OperA organizational model
as basis for analysis and design. We provide a formal interpretation of the adaptation
process for organizations, based on the Logic for Agent Organizations (LAO) [3,5].
The aim of our work is modeling context changes that affect organizational struc-
tures and agents’ social and intentional relationships. The formal specification of or-
ganizations enables the description and analysis of adaptation which contributes to the
(automatic) redesign of structures.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the basic notions of the for-
mal specification for agent organizations adopted in our design framework, and gives an
overview about the OperA methodology, applying it to a crisis management scenario.
Section 3 discusses different forms of adaptation that may affect organization struc-
tures. Section 4 defines the adaptation of organization structures by the use of a formal
specification. In Section 5 some related work is given. Finally, Section 6 gives some
conclusions and points out main future work directions.

2 Background
2.1 The ALIVE Project
Currently, there is a general feeling that networked applications based on the notion
of software services will make it possible to radically create new types of software
systems. However, the deployment of such applications will require profound changes
in the way in which software systems are designed, deployed and managed.
The ALIVE project [1] aims to contribute to this development by the application of
strategies used today to organize the vastly complex interdependencies found in hu-
man social, economic behaviour to the structuring and design of future service-based
software systems. More specifically, the project aims to combine coordination and or-
ganisational mechanisms and Model Driven Design to create a framework for software
and service engineering for “live” open systems of active services.
The project extends current trends in service-oriented engineering by adding three
extra levels (see Figure 1).

– The Service level augments and extends existing service models with semantic de-
scriptions to make components aware of their social context and of engagement
rules with other services.
– The Coordination level provides the means to specify, at a high level, interaction
patterns between services, using a variety of powerful coordination techniques from
recent European research in the area.
– The Organisation level provides context for the other levels – specifying the or-
ganizational rules that govern interactions and using recent developments in orga-
nizational dynamics to allow the structural adaptation of distributed systems over
time.
20 H. Aldewereld et al.

Organisational level role

role role role

Model-Driven Engineering
Coordination level
actor
Formal Framework

actor
actor
actor

Service level SD SD

SD
SD SD SD

WS WS

WS
WS WS WS

Fig. 1. The ALIVEframework for software and service engineering

2.2 A Formal Model for Organizations

As basis for the specification of organizational adaptation, we use the formal modal
Logic for Agent Organizations – LAO [3]. LAO provides a formal definition of organi-
zations, based on the main concepts of structure, environment and agent [17]. In LAO,
agents are seen as actors that make possible the achievement of organizational objec-
tives1 . LAO is an extension of the well known branching time temporal logic CTL [7].
It includes the CTL modalities  (‘always in the future’), ♦ (‘eventually in the future’),
◦ (‘in the next state’) extended with modalities for agent ability, capability, attempt and
activity which we discuss below.
Given a world w ∈ W that represents a possible state of affairs, an organization Ow
is defined as
Ow = {Aw w w w
O , ≤O , DO , SO }

where AO is a set of agents, ≤O a partial order relation on AO reflecting the social

dependencies among actors of the organization, DO is a set of objectives (states of
affairs to achieve), and SO is the set of current assets and characteristics of O, e.g.,
capabilities, activities, responsibilities, etc.
Given a set of atomic propositions Φ, for each agent a we partition Φ in two classes:
the set of atomic propositions that agent a is capable of realizing, Ca (⊆ Φ), and the
set of atomic propositions that a cannot realize, C̄a , C̄a = Φ \ Ca . The composition
of atomic propositions of an agent a ∈ AO , i.e., the set of its complex propositions, is
called Σa .
1
Even though organizational structures are typical defined in terms of roles, specifying and
distributing responsibilities and objectives among roles, for simplicity sake [3] abstracts from
the role concept, only considering role enacting agent, an agent that plays one role.