Organizations represent an effective mechanism for activity coordination, not only for humans but also for agents. Nowadays, the organization concept has become a relevant issue in the multi-agent system area, as it enables analysing and designing coordination and collaboration mechanisms in an easier way, specially for open systems.

Organization Theory has largely tackled with human organizations and their designing features. Thus, this thesis deeply takes into account the Organization Theory approach in order to adopt some specific mechanisms and guidelines that help with designing complex multi-agent systems based on organizations.

In this way, the main features of an organization that are needed for its effective design have been analyzed. Moreover, a state of art study of how the organization concept has been employed in both multi-agent system methodologies and agent platforms has been carried out. Thus, their necessities for an appropiate management of organizations have been extracted.

Based on all those studies, an Organizational Model has been defined, which constitutes the first main contribution of this thesis. This model is composed of six meta-models that detail the specific features of an organization: structure, functionality, normativity, dynamicity and environment. Those meta-models, which are extensions of both INGENIAS and ANEMONA ones, are mainly based in the following concepts: organizational unit, service, norm and environment. Furthermore, a set of design patterns has been developed that contributes to an easier modeling of the organizational structure.

The Organizational Model, combined with the Organization Theory, has been employed for adapting the organizational design process to the multi-agent system domain. In this way, as second main contribution of this thesis, a Methodological Guideline has been developed, which gives support for the analysis and design of open multi-agent systems, following a human organizational point of view. This guideline is composed of a set of phases for requirement analysis, structure design and organizational dynamics design. In these phases, designers mainly specify which are the services that the system offers, which is its internal structure and which are the norms that control its behavior, taking into account the specific features of open multiagent systems.

Finally, both the Methodological Guideline and the Organizational Model have been applied in two case-studies (a travel agency system and a personalized information system), so then they have been validated in different open systems. In the first case, the system acts as a regulated meetingpoint, in which providers and clients contact between them for consuming or producing touristic services. In the second case, the system controls the different groups that users create and also their behavior as information providers or reviewers.