Towards an organizational model for agent societies using contracts

The development of multi-agent systems calls for modeling primitives that are able to represent communication, interaction, roles and other concepts that characterize multi-agent systems. Such modeling primitives are usually not provided by (single) agent languages. Furthermore, models of organizations must incorporate the collective characteristics of the domain. We propose a conceptual framework for agent societies, consisting of three interrelated models, that distinguishes between organizational and operational aspects of the domain. Contract rules specify commitments between agents and society concerning role enactment, and commitments between agents concerning interaction.