MAHIS: An Agent-Oriented Methodology for Constructing Dynamic Platform-Based HIS

The push and pull provided by information technology and rapidly changing business demands have led to virtual work becoming increasingly important in organizations. Virtual work can take various forms, from telecommuting to global project development teams. In virtual organizations and communities, individuals can be part of groups that have no physical co-location, and often do not meet, except virtually. Increased globalization, tightened traveling budgets, and heightened security awareness foster the growth of virtual environments. This mini-track focuses on issues related to challenges presented by and effectiveness of virtual work, teams, organizations, and communities. We sought papers addressing these issues from an organizational, managerial, team, community, or individual perspective, as well as papers on enabling technologies and their use in this environment. The resulting twelve papers published in the HICSS-38 proceedings investigate a variety of important topics of interest to researchers and practitioners. Walther, Bunz, and Bazarova address the development of trust in virtual groups. They propose communication rules based on social information processing theory, and empirically test them. Keim and Weitzel also explore trust development in establishing successful virtual partnerships. Factors influencing performance of virtual teams are of critical interest to researchers and practitioners. Staples and Cameron report results from a field study examining relationships between team performance and interpersonal skills, team size, and turnover. DeLone, Espinosa, Lee, and Carmel present a conceptual framework for global IS development project success. They conduct interviews with global project managers to validate the framework. Role coordination -preventing the emergence of individual roles and building shared team interaction mental models -is an important aspect of task performance in teams. Sutanto, Phang, Kuan, Kankanhalli, and Tan investigate this phenomenon in two global virtual teams and offer suggestions on how effective role coordination can be achieved. Galvin, McKinney, and Chudoba also investigate individuals’ integration with the team in pursuit of common objectives, proposing a model to help better understand the process of transformation from being individually centric to being team centric. Zhang, Fjermestad, and Tremain analyze and identify drawbacks and inconsistencies in previous empirical literature on leadership style in the virtual team context. They develop propositions for future research. Misiolek and Heckman examine leadership behavior in virtual teams by observing a virtual collaboration exercise and developing insights into how leadership behaviors emerge and are distributed. Addressing an increasingly important virtual team structure, Mark and Abrams investigate largescale group-to-group collaboration. They examine how interactions differ between collocated and distributed settings in a design team. Results indicate that subgroup interactions occurred differently within sites compared to across sites. DeLuca and Valacich examine communication media choice in virtual groups in two organizations. Results support Media Synchronicity Theory. Bhappu and Crews explore effects of communication media and conflict on team identification in diverse teams and suggest ways diverse teams can manage intra-group conflict. Chidambaram and Carte also examine virtual teams with diverse membership. They propose a model that describes how collaborative technologies can help leverage positive aspects of diversity and limit negative aspects; they then test the model in a longitudinal field study.

The organizational concept of virtual Web organizations encompasses three organizational elements, namely the relatively stable virtual Web platform from which dynamic virtual corporations derive. Virtual corporations are interorganizational adhocracies that are configured temporally of independent companies in order to serve a particular purpose, such as joint R&D, product development, and production. The third element of this organizational construct is the management organization that initiates and maintains the virtual Web platform as well as forms and facilitates the operation of dynamic virtual corporations. Since the organizational concept of virtual Web organizations is hardly researched this chapter aims to provide readers with a better understanding of the organizational concept of virtual Web organizations and in particular of how such an organizational construct is managed. Based on empirical research the author developed a competence-based management model of virtual Web management organizations. This competence-based view of virtual Web management organizations presents an overview of a set of common sub-competencies underlying the three virtual Web management’s main competencies of initiating and maintaining virtual Web platforms and forming dynamic virtual corporations. Furthermore, the developed competence-based management model describes the content of the individual sub-competencies and it explains the purpose, the interrelateness and the temporal dimensions of the virtual Web management’s sub-competencies.

This chapter addresses how agent organisations can improve and accelerate coordination processes in open environments. A state-of-art of recent proposals for describing agent organisations is given, relating the different methodologies and formal approaches for defining agent organisations in an explicit way. As example, four different proposals developed within the COST action IC0801 are detailed: (i) the MOISE organisation Model, which provides structural, functional and normative specifications of an organisation, and it is integrated in an Organisation Management infrastructure; (ii) the Virtual Organisation Model, which describes the structural, functional, dynamical, environmental and normative dimensions of an organisation, and it is complemented by the Virtual Organisation Formalization; (iii) the Agent-Oriented Modelling for sociotechnical systems, which are organisations consisting of human and man-made agents; and (iv) the AAOL agent architecture, in which groups of autonomous agents are organized in Localities. This chapter proposes a global comparison of different existing organisational models with the four detailed models in terms of the different description dimensions they propose.

This work presents an extension of the Environment Dimension of the Virtual Organization Model, which is an Organization Modeling Language to define Organization-Centered Multi-Agent Systems. This extension allows this model to regulate the environment by supporting artifacts for organizational mechanisms, an approach based on the Agents & Artifacts conceptual framework. The three main entities of this framework are agents, artifacts and workspaces, which have been integrated in this work inside the Virtual Organization Model. Additionally, this paper presents an application to the health care setting and an analysis of the related work on this topic.

Intelligent agents are classified into various types depending on whether they just react to the stimuli they perceive (reactive) or they develop plans to solve their own goals (proactive or goal-oriented). In practice, agents are a mixture of two layers since they perform reactive or proactive tasks depending on what is the most appropriate at a given time (hybrid agents). Bearing in mind the dynamic organisation of a multi-agent system consisting of any of the above types, it is only natural to consider Population P Systems as a suitable candidate for modelling. In this paper, we describe preliminary work done towards modelling of MAS which include all types of agents. An initial attempt is made to tackle certain issues that have to do with the objects and rules that define each agent operation. Alongside the alternative solutions, we present a concrete example to demonstrate our findings and raise discussions.KeywordsIntelligent AgentIncoming MessageProactive BehaviourReactive AgentRescue UnitThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The dissolution of Virtual Organizations is not just a stage where the commitments between the partners take to an end, but an issue that is worth considering through all the life cycle in Virtual Organizations. This paper gives further light to the model of Virtual Organizations split in several phases, detailing their roles and significance, and explaining from previous experiences why the dissolution has to be carefully planned fairly in advance. The key elements for managing the dissolution of virtual organizations are described, and further evidence on how they can have positive influence to the performance of Virtual Organizations, are contributed highlighting the phase’s significance.

In recent years, agent-oriented methodologies have emerged in the academic domain, each one having its specificities: agent model, formalism, programming, and application domain. However, no methodology has ever been extended to the domain of business processes. The goal of this paper is to use the agent paradigm, i.e. the general logic and the conceptual aspects of its technologies, in the development of a methodology dedicated to the business process management. The proposed approach is inspired by existing agent-based methodologies and from the study of business processes and their modeling. It follows the waterfall model, in which the traditional development phases are easily performed with a return to the previous ones. This approach permits an easy and simple transition from the analysis phase to the implementation one through a general and architectural design. Also, it aims to improve and to optimize the management, interoperability, and reusability of the different business processes that compose the organization and to harmonize the collaborative work of their components. Our methodology consists of four main phases: Analysis, architectural design, general design, and implementation.

This paper describes how the organizational semiotics field can provide a conceptual infrastructure for designing normative multi-agent information systems. Since ‘information’ is an ill-defined word we prefer to adopt the semiotics framework, which uses the ‘sign’ as the elementary concept. Information as a composition of signs is then analyzed at different levels, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the social level. Based on different properties of signs, found at different semiotic levels, we propose here a new agent model, designated by EDA (an acronym for its three component modules: Epistemic-Deontic-Axiological), to represent agent informational states and simultaneously define its conceptual communication framework. The norm-based and communication-based multi-agent social architecture defined in this paper is flexible enough to accommodate changes in social structure, including changes in role specification, role instantiation and even the dynamics of institutional relationships, including role removal or creation. Communication is supported by a technical infrastructure (JINI) that enables both direct message exchange and blackboard protocols. Agents are enabled with logical reasoning for a flexible implementation of conversations, which are conceptually described by finite state machines.

Model for assigning roles automatically in egovernment virtual organizations

Nowadays, challenge is to design complex systems that evolve in changing environments. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are an answer to implement them and many agent-oriented methodologies are proposed to guide designers. Self-organisation is a promising paradigm to make these systems adaptive: the collective function arises from the local interactions and the system design becomes thus bottom-up. The difficulty rests then in finding the right behaviours at the agent-level to make the adequate global function emerge. The aim of this paper is to show how simulation can help designers to find these correct behaviours during the design stage: by simulating a simplified system and observing it during execution, a designer can modify and improve the behaviour of agents. A model of cooperative agents was implemented under the SeSAm platform in order to be integrated into ADELFE, an agent-oriented methodology dedicated to adaptive MAS (AMAS). This model is described here and applied to show how the behaviour of a simple ecosystem can be improved.

This paper presents an approach of generating the user interface from the task model. Our work is situated in the course of approaches based on models. This approach called TOOD (Task Object Oriented Design) is based on a formal notation, which gives quantitative results that may be checked by designers and provide the possibility of performing mathematical verifications on the models. The modelling formalism is based on the joint use of the object approach and high level Petri nets. The TOOD method integrates different models (task model, user model, local model of the interface, abstract model of the interface, and model of the implementation) and their relations. An example, extracted from the air traffic control, is presented to illustrate TOOD methodology.

The KADS (knowledge acquisition and design structuring) system, which guides knowledge engineering using organizational models, task models, expertise models, cooperation models, and design models, is reviewed. Model-K, the result of combining high-level languages with KADS to reach a smoother and speeder transition from the conceptual model to a prototype and the running system, is reviewed. Model-K closes the gap between the knowledge level and the symbolic level, letting developers specify KADS conceptual models and refine them to operational systems. The language lets developers arbitrarily interleave both activities, thereby supporting early prototyping at the highest level. Systems written in model-K contain their own conceptual model, making them more transparent and easier for experts and users to understand and for knowledge engineers to maintain.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Event-Driven Notation and Hierarchical Automata Semantics for Incremental Task Modeling

Most hybrid agent architectures are constructed with a hierarchical succession of reactive (at a lower level) and cognitive (at a higher level) layers. Each of these layers represents a behavior, a function, a decision, etc. Instead of using such functional layers, we propose in this paper a generic model of a social hybrid agent, which is based on natural (human/animal) motivations of the agent. We discuss here the contribution of our approach in hybrid agent modeling. The present work uses the American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs. The basis of this modeling uses the result of an existing psychological study.KeywordsMultiagent SystemGeneric MotivationState RatioCognitive AgentFunctional MotivationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper describes a hybrid-agent organization model from a logical-heuristic point of view. The organization model is an ordered set composed of an environment (or domain), the hybrid agents as elements of the environmental structure, as well as some connecting functions. A hybrid-agent in an organization structure is composed of a heuristic-decision support system (HDSS) and the decision-maker (the user) is one of the units. By using this hybrid-agent organization modeling, we can provide instruments that will help with the making of decisions in a financial organization such as a commercial bank.