How to Program Organizations and Roles in the JADE Framework

The organization metaphor is often used in the design and implementation of multiagent systems. However, few agent programming languages provide facilities to define them. Several frameworks are proposed to coordinate MAS with organizations, but they are not programmable with general purpose languages. In this paper we extend the JADE framework with primitives to program in Java organizations structured in roles, and to enable agents to play roles in organizations. Roles facilitate the coordination of agents inside an organization and offer new abilities (powers) in the context of organizations to the agents which satisfy the requirements necessary to play the roles. To program organizations and roles, we provide primitives which enable an agent to enact a new role in an organization to invoke powers.