Linking Micro and Macro Description of Scalable Social Systems Using Reference Nets

Socionics attempts to release the architecture of multi-agent systems from the restrictive micro perspective viewpoint by the integration of the macro perspective in order to arrive at innovative agent systems. This paper shows how central research topics of sociology and computer science can be combined, in order to arrive at innovative agent systems. In the context of sociology the duality of micro and macro elements is relevant, while recursiveness of models appears in the perspective of computer science. These two elements are unified in our work to the socionic multi-agent architecture

Sonar

.

The formal model, on which the representation bases, is the recursive formalism of reference nets—an extension of Petri nets that permits to understand nets again as tokens. With the help of these nets first of all a compact implementation of the multi-agent architecture

Mulan

is designed, secondly it serves as a description language for the sociological model, which is the fundament of

Sonar

. The main result here is to present an architecture based on

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and

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allowing to cover the micro as well as the macro perspective in agent-oriented modelling. Doing so, we introduce a scalable model based on agent systems.