CoOrg 2005

Organizations embody a powerful way to coordinate complex behavior in human society. Different models of organisations exist, from bureaucratic systems based on norms to competitive systems based on markets. Moreover, organizational concepts allow to structure the behavior of complex entities in a hierarchy of encapsulated entities: departments structured in roles, organisations structured in departments, and interorganizational coordination structured in organizations. Organizations specify the interaction and communication possibilities of each of these entities, abstracting from the implementation of their behavior. Since these entities are autonomous, they can only be coordinated exogeneously.

Organisational models have been popular in the last years in agent theory for modelling coordination in open systems, where departments and organisations are modelled as autonomous entities. This is also due to the need to ensure social order within MAS applications like Web Services, Grid Computing, and Ubiquitous Computing. In these settings, openness, heterogeneity, and scalability pose new challenges on traditional MAS organizational models. It becomes necessary to integrate organizational and individual perspectives and to promote the dynamic adaptation of models to organizational and environmental changes. Nowadays, practical applications of agents to organizational modeling are being widely developed.

Moreover, organisational concepts are used frequently for coordination purposes in different areas of Computer Science. For example, roles are used in access control, conceptual modelling, programming languages and patterns. Contracts are used in design by contract, and services are used in web services and service level agreements. Message based communication is used in networking. Finally, coordination techniques are used in formal models of organisations to analyse or simulate them. In contrast, most coordination languages refer mostly to different kinds of metaphors, like blackboards, shared dataspaces, component composition and channels.

Although coordination is usually said to be of a multidisciplinary nature, the links between organisations and coordination have never received proper attention at the coordination conferences. CoOrg 2005, as part of COORDINATION2005, will provide an excellent opportunity to meet researchers studying coordination and organisations in cognitive science, social sciences, agent theory, computer science, philosophy, etc., to discuss the current state of the art and identify potential future directions and research issues.

• Organisational concepts and methods for coordination: role based coordination, contract based coordination, coordination in normative multiagent systems, service oriented coordination
• Coordination techniques for organisations: normative systems, markets, authority and power, trust
• Interorganisational coordination: control of autonomy in coordination, integration of organizations
• Applications of coordination and organisation: multiagent social simulation models, organization based software engineering, organization oriented programming, organizational patterns