2nd International Workshop on Coordination and Organisation
Bologna, Italy, 13/06/2006
The aim of the workshop is to study the role of coordination in organisations, for example, the models recently developed in the field of multi-agent systems. Organisations embody a powerful way to coordinate complex behaviour in human society. Different models of organisations exist, from bureaucratic systems based on norms to competitive systems based on markets. Moreover, organisational concepts allow to structure the behaviour of complex entities in a hierarchy of encapsulated entities: departments structured in roles, organisations structured in departments, and societies structured in organisations. Organisations specify the interaction and communication possibilities of each of these entities, abstracting from the implementation of their behaviour.
Organisational models have been studied in the last years in agent theory with the goal of modelling coordination in open systems. This is also due to the need to ensure social order within multi-agent system applications like Electronic Institutions, Supply Chain Management, social simulation, Workflow Management, and Web Services. In these applications, openness, heterogeneity, and scalability pose new challenges on traditional multi-agent system organisational models. It becomes necessary to integrate organisational and individual perspectives and to promote the dynamic adaptation of models to organisational and environmental changes.
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.
Special attention will be devoted this year to the notion of role. Roles are of particular importance for coordination as they are used to model the interaction among agents in a context. The attention of the computer science community towards roles is witnessed by events like the AAAI Fall Symposium 2005 on Roles (http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/roles05) and the ECOOP'05 Workshop Views, Aspects and Roles (http://swt.cs.tu-berlin.de/~stephan/VAR05/). 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 2006, as part of Coordination 2006, 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.
temi di interesse
- Implementation of coordination and organisation models for multi-agent systems: organisation oriented programming, programming languages for coordination and organisation, organisation based software engineering, organisational patterns
- Organisational concepts and methods for coordination: role based coordination, contract based coordination, coordination in normative multi-agent systems, service oriented coordination
- Coordination techniques for organisations: normative systems, markets, authority and power, trust
- Interorganisational coordination: control of autonomy in coordination, integration and coordination of organisations, dynamic reconfiguration of multi-agent system organisations
- Applications of coordination and organisation: multi-agent social simulation models, disaster management, supply chain management
evento ospitante
evento colocato
MTCoord 2006
funge da
evento origine per pubblicazione
Preface (editoriale/introduzione/prefazione, 2007) — Guido Boella, Mehdi Dastani, Andrea Omicini, Ivana Černá, Isabelle Linden
evento ospitato per
evento della serie
