# Towards Agent Organizations Interoperability: A Model Driven Engineering Approach
## 7 Related Work  
The proposition of abstract structures, such as patterns, and integrated metamodel to enable interoperability among organization-centered multiagent systems is somehow new. Therefore, related work must be considered in several areas from business to services, including multiagent systems. In the following we contextualize our work within this broad scenario. In the multiagent systems area, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [57] adopted a model-driven approach to propose a general metamodel for developing multiagent systems. The metamodel is defined as a Platform Independent Model (PIM) considering the MDA abstraction levels definition [18]. In order to identify a unified metamodel to support the development of agent-based systems, they considered seven views: Multiagent view; Agent view; Behavioural view; Organization view; Role view; Interaction view and Environment view. They adopted the top down approach to develop the metamodels that represent each of the views aforementioned after analysing some existing agent-oriented modeling languages, methodologies and programming languages. Moreover, it was conceived to be used independently of the agent-oriented methodology, modeling and programming languages. Nevertheless, their main purpose was to support the development of MAS using a model-driven approach than providing means for interoperability among MAS. Our work presents some similarities with theirs since the proposed integrated metamodel could be used independently of the Organization Model adopted to design and implement an organization-centered MAS. In addition, the abstract structures where defined based on organization-centered multiagent systems dimensions, in a similar approach of theirs when stating their metamodel concerning some views. Nevertheless, although using a model driven approach, we adopted it to define the way integration occurs using the bottom-up approach to define the integrated metamodel, based on existing Agent Organization Models and their underlying metamodels. By doing that we foster interoperability to organization-centered MAS during design time, by providing means of transforming the design of a MAS with an underlying organization model into another one, or during execution time, as presented in Section 6. [PERSON] and colleagues [58] provided organizational interoperability by using organizational artifacts within the environment where the MAS is situated. They adopted a normative language to describe the organizational structure in artifacts. In this sense, their work is similar to ours while adopting a common language (in our case a common metamodel) to describe several organizational models. [PERSON] and colleagues [59] classified organizational structures according to organizational paradigms, such as (i) hierarchy, (ii) holarchy, (iii) coalition, (iv) team, (v) congregation, (vi) society, (vii) federation and (viii) market, to support the design of MAS using existing agent-oriented methodologies and organizational models. The main purpose of their work is to provide information for MAS developers that would like to adopt an organization approach to develop MAS and did not know what Organization Model or agent-oriented methodology to choose. Their work is related to ours in the sense they adopted metamodels' characteristics of existing organizational models and existing agent-oriented methodologies to classify such organizational structures as patterns. [PERSON] et al. [60] proposed an inter-organization interoperability architecture based on multiagent systems, web services and semantic web technologies. In their work, the MAS did not present an underlying organizational model and agents adopt the \"head body\" paradigm to include web services technologies to provide interoperability among enterprise information systems. Therefore, interoperability is focused on system-to-system communication using web services technologies, which limits the kind of systems that may participate in such communication.