Engineering deontic protocols by means of organizational Petri nets

摘要

Multi-agent systems are known to be an adequate design paradigm to build cooperative information systems. The efficient and effective use of agent technology in organizations requires structuring the design of cooperative information systems upon protocols. To properly capture and implement the concepts involved in the operation of an organization, protocols have to meet three requirements: (1) being able to take into account and to integrate three interdependent and complementary concerns of organizations (the informational, organizational and behavioral dimensions), (2) dealing with the deontic aspects (obligations, permissions and prohibitions) of interaction rules, (3) supporting concurrency, openness and reliability.rnPetri net (PN) dialects are formalisms known to be well adapted to model protocols and to cope easily with the last requirement. Moreover, they cover all the protocol engineering life cycle (specification, analysis and simulation), including the implementation thanks to their operational semantics. However, existing PN dialects do not deal simultaneously with the first two requirements.rnIn this paper, a new Petri net-based formalism called organizational Petri nets (OgPN) is proposed. OgPN satisfies the three previous requirements in a formal and coherent framework. It also provides a process to design and develop OgPN models. The advantages of this formalism are: (1) an easy integration of the designed protocols in organizations, (2) the possibility to simulate these protocols before their deployment and (3) the possibility to analyze their behavioral properties. Thus, OgPN is a serious candidate formalism to specify protocols in cooperative information systems and may be included in agent-oriented methodologies like GAIA or MOISE+.