Title: An organisational approach to engineer emergence within holarchies

Authors: Massimo Cossentino, Stephane Galland, Nicolas Gaud, Vincent Hilaire, Abderrafiaa Koukam

Addresses: ICAR-CNR, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Ed. 11. c&47#;o CUC (Centro Universitario di Calcolo), 90128 Palermo, Italy. ' SeT Laboratory, UTBM, 90010 Belfort Cedex, France. ' SeT Laboratory, UTBM, 90010 Belfort Cedex, France. ' SeT Laboratory, UTBM, 90010 Belfort Cedex, France. ' SeT Laboratory, UTBM, 90010 Belfort Cedex, France

Abstract: An open issue in self-organisation is how to engineer emergent behaviours. This issue is also of interest for engineering holonic multi-agent systems as any level of a holarchy is dependant of the emergent behaviours of its sub-levels. In order to tackle this specific feature of holonic multi-agent systems, the capacity concept which abstracts a know-how from its concrete realisation is introduced. The use of this concept is illustrated in this paper through a case study using the ASPECS development process which enables the analysis, design, implementation and deployment of holonic multi-agent systems and integrates the capacity as a core concept of it is underlying metamodel, called capacity-role-interaction-organisation (i.e., CRIO).

Keywords: agent-oriented software engineering; emergence; holonic systems; holarchies; self-organisation; emergent behaviours; holonic MAS; multi-agent systems; agent-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2010.036986

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2010 Vol.4 No.3, pp.304 - 329

Published online: 20 Nov 2010 *

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