Towards an Integral Approach of Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems

In this chapter, we stress the importance of thinking a MAS in all its aspects (agents, environment, interactions, organizations, and institutions), using a more integral vision. We show that a genuine organizational approach has to take into account both the environment and the institutional part of MAS societies. Then, we propose the MASQ (Multi-Agent System based on Quadrants) meta-model, which constitutes an abstraction of the various aspects of an OCMAS (Organization Centered Multi-Agent Systems), extending AGR (Agent/Group/Role). MASQ is based on a four-quadrant framework, where the analysis and design of a system is performed along two axes: an interior/exterior dimension and an individual/collective dimension. We give a conceptual definition of this approach and we will show that it is possible to apply it to practical models.