# Towards Agent Organizations Interoperability: A Model Driven Engineering Approach
## 6 Organizational Interoperability Approach  
Adopting an organization-centered perspective [4], the engineering of MAS can be described as a process that starts with the creation of an _organizational specification_ written in conformance to an _organizational model_. This specification is a prescription of the desired patterns of joint activity that should occur inside the MAS towards some desired purpose. Once the organizational specification is done, it is used as the input to an _organizational infrastructure_. In general, what we mean by organizational infrastructure is some kind of middleware supposed to interpret the specification and reify the _organizational_ of the MAS outside the agents. In this respect, it should maintain an internal _organizational state_ and offer to the agents an interface for accessing and modifying this state. The information maintained in the organizational state contains a list of the members of the organization, what roles they are playing, what groups are active in the organization, among others. Finally, with the organizational infrastructure materializing the desired agent organization, it is time to develop application domain agents (not necessarily by the same designer of the organization specification) that can enter and interact inside it by accessing the available organizational interface. Regarding _organizational infrastructures_ there are several approaches for the engineering of (open) agent organizations [12; 13; 36; 47; 51; 52; 53; 54]. On the one hand, the availability of a wide range of diverse models and infrastructures has made the development of agent organizations feasible. On the other hand, such a diversity introduced an important new interoperability challenge for agent designers: How to deal with heterogeneous organizational models and infrastructures? Whenever an agent is build to enter some MAS it has to be able to interact with the other participants using a particular agent communication language as well as to understand received messages against a given domain ontology. Besides this, if the MAS was designed as an agent organization, the entering agent has also to be able to access a particular organizational infrastructure and to interpret its underlying organizational model. In this way, the agent design can become tailored to a particular organizational approach. For instance, suppose that several e-business applications designed as open agent organizations are available on the Internet. In addition, assume that these applications are heterogeneous regarding the organizational technology applied to build them. To put it in more concrete terms, let us suppose  
Figure 9: Integrated metamodel \(MM^{int}_{\mathbf{\theta_{2}}}\). two agents organizations: One built upon the S-MOISE+ [53] organizational middleware, based on the MOISE+ model, and the other by using MADKIT [54] platform, based on ARG model. In this setup (and assuming a shared common agent communication language and domain ontology), the agent designers face the following problem: The native S-MOISE+ agents do not interoperate with the MADKIT platform, and vice-versa. Thus, it is not directly possible, for instance, to write an agent code that enter both e-business agent organizations in the search of products and/or services on behalf of its users. Such fact limits the range of applicability of S-MOISE+ and MADKIT agents which, in turn, limits the idea of open MAS. As mentioned in the Introduction, four basic approaches can be envisioned for this organizational interoperability problem. One of them is to bridge the interface between the external agents and the agent organization by means of model mapping (Adaptation). By using such mappings it is possible to provide adapted copies of the specification and state of a given organizational model/infrastructure \"understood\" by the external agents. In what follows we describe MAORI--a _Model-based Architecture for ORganizational Interoperability_[19].