Programming Role Enactment through Reflection

Abstract

Organizational modeling languages are used to specify an agent organization in terms of its roles, organizational structure, norms, etc. Agents take part in organizations by playing one or more of the specified roles. Using such an organizational specification to organize a multi-agent system can support agents' effectiveness in attaining their purpose, or prevent certain undesired behavior from occurring. In this paper, we investigate the process of role enactment in organizations that have a so-called gatekeeper that is responsible for admitting agents to the organization, like the well-known OperA organizational modelling language. We propose an interaction protocol between gatekeeper and agents that want to play roles, resulting in admittance of agents to the organization (or rejection). We analyze which kinds of reasoning are needed for agents to participate in this protocol. In particular, agents need to be able to reason about whether they have the necessary capabilities to play a role in an organization. We make precise what it means to have a capability and propose to integrate reasoning about capabilities in agent programming languages using reflection. We show how this kind of reflection about capabilities can be used to program role enactment in the GOAL agent programming language.