Organizational models often rely on two assumptions: openness and heterogeneity. This is, for instance, the case with organizations consisting of individuals whose behaviour is unpredictable, whose internal structure is unknown, and who do not necessarily share common goals, desires, or intentions. This fact has motivated the adoption of social-based approaches to modelling interaction in organizational models. The idea of social semantics is to abstract away from the agent internals and provide a social meaning to agent message exchanges. In this chapter, we present and discuss two declarative, social semantic approaches for modelling interaction. The first one takes a state-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of commitments. The second one adopts a rule-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of logical formulae expressing expectations about agent interaction. We use a simple interaction protocol taken from the e-commerce domain to present the functioning and features of the commitment- and expectation-based approaches, and to discuss various forms of reasoning and verification that they accommodate, and how organizational modelling can benefit from them.

To facilitate the development of multi-agent systems and improve the reusability, robustness and feasibility of these systems, we have developed a role-based agent development framework (RADE). In this paper, we present an integrated approach for modeling, designing and implementing multi-agent systems using RADE. We describe the design of agents and motivations within such framework. We introduce a practical approach for modeling agent’s motivation and specifying agent’s goals, where a role-agent mapping mechanism is developed based on this design. Dynamic task allocation is achieved through the creation of role instances and the mapping from role instances to agents. We also introduce the RTÆMS language based on the extension of TÆMS to model the plan tree for each goal. This representation enables the reuse of general planning/scheduling and collaboration/cooperation mechanisms developed in multi-agent system research community. We have developed an automatic agent generation interface and also implemented a simple demo system in health care domain.

Abstract—Communities of web services have been proposed to gather web services having the same functionalities but possibly different nonfunctional properties. Current approaches into communities of web services focus on developing, managing and designing communities of web services through a suitable architecture, but can benefit from a stronger treatment of flexible interactions. These approaches ignore the collaboration and business-level contracts between various web services and the ability to formally delegate service to another web service within the same community. This paper presents a significant step towards enhancing communities of web services using an agent-based approach that synthesizes mentalistic states (e.g. goals, tasks), social commitments and argumentative dialogues for modeling and establishing communities of web services. This paper has three contributions: first, we extend the community structure with alliances structure to allow collaboration between various web services; second, we propose a new engineering methodology based on concepts of Tropos methodology for managing communities of web services with alliances structure; and third, we specify internal-organizational business interactions within web services in terms of commitments augmented with argumentative dialogues to reason about the validity of these commitments. We evaluate our methodology using a large existing case study of auto insurance claim processing. I.

Business service engagements involve processes that extend across two or more autonomous organizations. Because of regulatory and competitive reasons, requirements for cross-organizational business processes often evolve in subtle ways. The changes may concern the business transactions supported by a process, the organizational structure of the parties participating in the process, or the contextual policies that apply to the process. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means for determining what needs to be changed and where. Cross-organizational settings exacerbate the shortcomings of traditional approaches because changes in one organization can potentially affect the workings of another. This paper describes Amoeba, a methodology for business processes that is based on business protocols. Protocols capture the business meaning of interactions among autonomous parties via commitments. Amoeba includes guidelines for (1) specifying cross-organizational processes using business protocols, and (2) handling the evolution of requirements via a novel application of protocol composition. This paper evaluates Amoeba using enhancements of a real-life business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing, and an aerospace case study.

Service oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for architecting and implementing business collaborations within and across organizational boundaries, is currently of interest to both software vendors and scientists. While the technologies for implementing and interconnecting basic services are reaching a good level of maturity, modeling service interaction from a global viewpoint, i.e., representing service choreographies, is still an open challenge. The main problem is that, although declarativeness has been identified as a key feature, several proposed approaches specify choreographies by focusing on procedural aspects, leading to over-constrained and over-specified models. To overcome these limits, we propose to adopt DecSerFlow, a truly declarative language, to model choreographies. Thanks to its declarative nature, DecSerFlow semantics can be given in terms of logic-based languages. In particular, we present how DecSerFlow can be mapped onto Linear Temporal Logic and onto Abductive Logic Programming. We show how the mappings onto both formalisms can be concretely exploited to address the enactment of DecSerFlow models, to enrich its expressiveness and to perform a variety of different verification tasks. We illustrate the advantages of using a declarative language in conjunction with logic-based semantics by applying

Agents enacting business processes in large open environments need to adaptively accommodate exceptions and opportunities. Multiagent approaches can help flexibly model business processes. This thesis proposes an event-driven architecture that enriches such models with events to support the agile enactment of processes. Specifically, we place this architecture in a business process framework based on protocols and policies, where agents ’ behaviors are specified via rules. The agents interact via messages, and agreements between them are modeled by commitments. These messages and commitments provide only a high-level view of the interactions and fail to capture fine-grained details of how the interactions were carried out and whether they were carried out smoothly. There might be hindrances due to internal and external influences, resulting in anomalies in the business process enactment. Handling such exceptions or capturing opportunities deviate the protocol from its routine execution but would restore the process to an acceptable state. Our approach introduces fine-grained event monitoring at specific points of the process enactment that require special attention. Detected exceptions are handled by the policies of the involved agents. Monitoring processes and thereby recovering

Environments in which Web service compositions (WSC) operate are often dynamic. We address the problem of which service to query for up-to-date information in order to adapt a hierarchical WSC, given that queries are not free. Previously, the value of changed information (VOC) has been proposed to select those services for querying whose revised non-functional information is expected to bring about the most change in the composition. In this paper, we present an approach for utilizing VOC in the context of a WSC composed of services and lower level WSCs, which induces a natural hierarchy over the composition. 1.

Existing methods for composing Web services assume that compositions are fixed. However, in practice, service environments are often volatile and parameters of participating services may change during the composition. This paper introduces a novel method for composing Web services in the presence of external volatile information. Our approach, which we call the informed-presumptive is compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches for Web service composition in volatile environments. We show empirically that the informed-presumptive strategy produces compositions in significantly less time than the other strategies with lesser backtracks.

Information

Environments in which Web service compositions (WSC) operate are often dynamic. We address the problem of which service to query for up-to-date information in order to adapt a hierarchical WSC, given that queries are not free. Previously, the value of changed information (VOC) has been proposed to select those services for querying whose revised non-functional information is expected to bring about the most change in the composition. VOC requires a distribution over the possible values of volatile parameters of the WSs. In this paper, we present an approach for utilizing VOC in the context of a WSC composed of WSs and lower level WSCs, which induces a natural hierarchy over the composition. Because parameters of composite WSs are not directly available, we aggregate these from parameters of component WSs and derive a distribution over the possible parameter values from the distributions for the WSs.