Reorganization in Multi-Agent Architectures: An Active Graph Grammar Approach

Background: Organizational architecture is a holistic approach to design of humane organizations and studies an organization from five perspectives: structure, culture, processes, strategy and individuals. In this paper the concept of organizational architecture is firstly formalized using the fractal principle and then applied to multi-agent systems’ (MAS) organizations. Objectives: Providing a holistic framework for modelling all aspects of MASreorganization. Methods/Approach: MAS organizations are formalized using graph theory and a new active graph rewriting formalism inspired by the active database theory is introduced. Results: The newly developed framework is graphical, event-driven and applied in a distributed MAS environment. Conclusions: By defining organizational units, processes, strategies and cultural artefacts in a recursive way, it is shown that labelled graphs and hypergraphs can be used to model various levels of organizational architecture while active graph grammars allow one to model reorganization of each of the architectural perspectives.