SONAR (Self-Organising Net ARchitecture)

Organisation-oriented software engineering is a discipline which incorporates research trends from distributed artificial intelligence, agent-oriented software en- gineering, and business information systems.

The basic metaphors are built around the interplay of the macro level (i.e. the organisation or institution) and the micro level (i.e. the agent).

Organisation-oriented software models are particularly interesting for self- and re-organising systems since the system’s organising principles (structural as well as behavioural) are taken into account explicitly by representing (in terms of reifying) them at run-time.

A Sonar-model encompasses (i) a data ontology, (ii) a set of interaction models (called distributed workflow nets, DWFs), (iii) a model, that describes the team-based delegation of tasks (called role/delegation nets), (iv) a network of organisational positions, and (v) a set of transformation rules.

Sonar is a platform independent organisation model which we have presented in [Köhler, M.: A formal model of multi-agent organisations. Fundamenta Informaticae 79, 415–430 (2007)].

In [Michael Köhler-Bußmeier, Matthias Wester-Ebbinghaus, and Daniel Moldt: Generating Executable Multi-agent System Prototypes from SONAR Specifications. M. De Vos et al. (Eds.): COIN 2010 International Workshops, LNAI 6541, pp. 21–38, Springer 2011] we turn to a middleware concept and its prototypical implementation for the complete organisational teamwork that is induced by Sonar.

SONAR defines a complete feedback loop: organisation -> team -> team plan -> transformation -> organisation.

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Tutorial slides at: ​http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/TGI/mitarbeiter/wimis/koehler/mulan4sonar-talk.pdf