Design of forces driving adaptation of agent organizations

Abstract

Adaptation is an important feature of human organizations. Being able to change allows them not only to survive, but to evolve to get new advantages from new situations happening in their environment or from inside the organization. The same way human organizations do, agent organizations should be able to adapt. Even if adaptation is addressed in the literature, it lacks the ability to clearly manage the reasons for change. These reasons are known in the social science bibliography as forces that drive the organizational change. These forces were introduced in a previous work in the computational domain, but only for the analysis phase of the engineering of agents organizations. In this work, a set of templates is presented to define these forces at design time. These templates have been applied in the design of components for detecting the ‘obtaining resources’ force, which have been implemented using Jason agents and CArtAgO artifacts within an agent organization.