Embodying Organisations - an Introduction

Agents and artifact model for MAS was recently proposed
for promoting artifact based environments aimed at improv-
ing agent coordination, goal oriented interactions and comu-
nication. Nevertheless, the use artifacts for organisational
purposes constraints agents to be aware of complex struc-
tures of an organisational specfication: for instance, agents
have to understand and be able to manipulate low level prim-
itives which may be not proper of an application domain. To
ease this requirement, we propose "embodied organisational
artifacts" (EOA) as an organisational layer binding environ-
ment artifacts with organisational ones. EOAs are aimed
at transparently interceding with the organisational struc-
tures, and at enabling possibly organisation-unaware agents
to play in organisations with no need to deal with low level
mechanisms of an organisaional specification. We propose a
formal description along with examples enlightening benefits
of the proposed approach.