Abstract
Researchers in Distributed Artificial Intelligence have employed the notion of “organization” to guide the design of distributed software systems. There is a growing consciousness that MAS designers have to be aware of the social factors underlying the formal organizational design. The study presented in this paper attempts to contribute to this development threefold: on a conceptual level, we offer a notion of organizational structures grounded in the theory of social systems according to Niklas Luhmann. On a methodological level, we employ methods of social network analysis as a tool for the detection and operationalization of such structures. Empirically, we demonstrate what results can be obtained by this approach to the observation of communicational patterns. With this study, we exemplify the fruitfulness and the scope of the novel perspective on organization for the design of MAS.
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Albrecht, S., Lübcke, M. (2004). Communicational Patterns as Basis of Organizational Structures. In: Lindemann, G., Moldt, D., Paolucci, M. (eds) Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems. RASTA 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2934. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25867-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25867-4_2
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