Example: Gaia Organizational Rules Example

Description of the Conference Management System Scenario used in this Gaia Organizational Rules Example

Let us consider an agent-based system for supporting the process of producing the technical program for an international conference. The process may be subdivided into three phases:
- The submission phase: the program committee chair (PC Chair) and the organizer distribute the call for papers. The authors submit their papers. The papers are classified (according to specific criteria), a submission number is assigned to each paper and the authors are notified about that.
- The review phase: the PC Chair distributes the papers among the PC Members which are in charge of providing reviews for those papers. The PC Chair collects back reviews, decides upon the acceptance/rejection of papers, and eventually notifies authors of the decision. Considering all the accepted papers, the PC Chair prepares the conference program.
- The publishing phase: the authors of the accepted papers have to produce a revised version of their papers. The publisher has to collect these final versions and compose the proceedings.

The process clearly involves three loosely interacting phases, each involving different actors, and naturally leads to conceiving one MAS for supporting the activities of each phases. There, personal agents will be naturally associated to the actors involved in the process (authors, PC Chair, PC Members, reviewers) to support their work. It is also natural that the roles played by each agent reflect the ones played by the associated actor in the conference organization. This may require agents to interact both directly with each other (according to patterns that will reflect the patterns of interactions in the real-world organizations), and indirectly (via exchanges of papers and review forms).

Organizational Rules – Examples

In the Conference Management Systems organizational rules may dictate constraints on who can (or cannot) review what (e.g., one cannot review his/her own papers), and on how the review process should proceed (e.g., by having at least three reviews by three different reviewer for each paper).

1) The rule expressing the fact that an author cannot act as a reviewer for its own paper can be expressed as:
¬(REVIEWER(paper(x)) | AUTHOR(paper(x)))

2) The role of reviewer must be played at least three times for each of the submitted papers (i.e., each must receive at least three reviews).

REVIEWER(paper(i))3+, i = 1, . . . , number of submitted papers
Such a rule should be coupled with another one avoiding a referee to review a paper multiple times.

3) The role in charge of setting up the conference program can only be played after that in charge of collecting all the reviews has been played.

REVIEWCOLLECTOR → DOPROGRAM.

Similarly, liveness and safety organizational rules can be imposed on protocols. For example:
1) The protocol P must be executed only once;

— P 1.
2) The protocol P must be executed only once by role R1;

— P(R1)1.
3) The protocol P must necessarily precede the execution of protocol Q;

— P → Q.
4) The protocol P must necessarily be executed by role R1 before R1 can execute protocol Q;

— P(R1) → Q(R1).

source: Reference of Dealing with Adaptive Multi-agent Organizations in the Gaia Methodology; Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology