# Towards Agent Organizations Interoperability: A Model Driven Engineering Approach
## 1 Introduction
In this paper, we call this issue the _organizational interoperability problem_. We can think about four basic approaches to solve the organizational interoperability problem: _Standardization_, _universal agents_, _delegation_ and _adaptation_. Standardization consists in providing interoperability by eliminating the root of the problem, the diversity, by means of a _standard model_ that has to be accepted and used by all developers [10]. The universal agents approach implies the creation of agents which are able to deal with several different organizational models [11]. Delegation means creating specialized services in middleware layers (like proxies [12] and governors [13]) to whom agents may delegate reasoning and decision mechanisms related to organizational issues. Adaptation, by its turn, is a solution based on the possibility of defining mappings between models [14]. From these mappings, an _adapter_ is created, a component that converts specifications from a model to another model [15; 16]. Each of these approaches have their pros and cons. Standardization fully eliminates the problem but it is politically and economically difficult to achieve and lets aside legacy systems. Universal agents must be updated every time a new model is created or changed. Delegation practically vanishes the agents organizational autonomy. Adaptation deals with legacy systems but it is technically difficult to achieve, if not impossible, when there are no meaningful mappings between the models. Motivated by the organizational interoperability problem and the basic approaches to it, all of which presuppose an integrated knowledge of the organizational models used to engineer agent organizations, the objective of this paper is to analyze the conceptual structures of several organizational models present in the literature and, based on this analysis, to propose an abstract and integrated view of the main concepts that have been used to specify agent organizations. We believe that the abstract view of organizational models we put forward can be used both as basis for defining essential mappings and for future standardization efforts of organizational models. This work is based on a previous work [17] in which we did a review of several prominent organizational models to answer the questions: How are the conceptual structures of the models related? Are there basic similarities? What are they? The answers we have given to these questions, in terms of _modeling dimensions_, are summarized in Section 2. The idea of modeling dimensions describes the organizational models basic similarities in broad terms. It characterizes the macrostructure of organizational models. In this paper we deepen our analysis by further exploring the conceptual structure within each modeling dimension. In this sense, we seek to characterize the common concepts and their relations found in existing organizational models along the modeling dimensions. The specific questions we propose to answer in this paper are: Inside each modeling dimension, what are the recurring modeling concepts? Is it possible to combine these recurring concepts into a coherent whole? How this can be used in a solution to the organizational interoperability problem? In approaching these questions, we have used techniques from Model Driven Engineering (MDE) [18]. Specifically, we think of organizational models as domain specific modeling languages whose conceptual structures are represented by means of metamodels. Thus, to address the questions systematically, we propose an iterative integration method, described in Section 3, aiming at building an integrated metamodel out of particular metamodels. A central step in the integration method is the identification of correspondences between the conceptual structure of organizational models represented by metamodels. To assist this identification, in Section 4, we analyze the recurring concepts of existing organizational models along the modeling dimensions.