Multi-agent systems can be viewed as organisations of individual agents. Designing an agent organisation is a complex process involving defining the structural relationships among agents, the lines of inter-agent communication, and the agent functionality. Existing approaches to agent organisation design are difficult to apply in practice since they require designers to make decisions while working at a low level of abstraction.This paper contributes towards designing agent organisations in a practical and effective manner by proposing to  semi-automate  the organisational design process. The proposed semi-automatic approach enables agent system designers to reason at a high abstraction level and conveniently re-use previous design decisions. This semi-automatic approach to agent organisation design uses role modelling and a  role algebra  which captures a number of basic relations among roles. The role algebra's semantics are formally defined using a two-sorted algebra.The applicability of the semi-automatic agent organisation design approach is demonstrated by an example drawn from a case study involving telephone repair service teams.
['Anthony Karageorgos', 'Simon Thompson', 'Nikolay Mehandjiev']
Semi-automatic design of agent organisations