What is Organizational Structure

Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve common goals for more or less autonomous agents. In order to develop a theory on the relationship between organizational structures, organizational actions, and actions of agents performing roles in the organization, we need a theoretical framework to describe and reason about organizations. The formal model presented in this chapter is sufficiently generic to enable the comparison of different existing organizational approaches to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), while having enough descriptive power to describe realistic organizations.