From the Analysis of Cooperation Within Organizational Environments to the Design of Cooperative Information Systems: An Agent-Based Approach

This paper presents an agent-oriented method and a generic agent-based architecture for the development of Cooperative Information Systems (CISs). The proposed method allows mastering the complexity of the cooperation processes and the difficulty of setting up effective CISs, by the analysis and the modelling of the cooperation in two levels of abstraction. The first level produces an understanding about organizational relationships and the rationales behind them. In this level, we use the i* framework, in which organizations and work processes are modeled in terms of dependency relationships among strategic actors. The second level focuses on the cooperation between software agents, where we use the AUML language for agents’ system modelling. The proposed architecture implemented in our work using the JADE platform lays a foundation for a possible approach to solve CISs related problems.