Evaluating organizational configurations

A Multi-Agent System is often conceived as an organization of autonomous software agents that participate into social and evolving structures (e.g., organizational configurations) suitable to deal with highly dynamic environments. Nevertheless, systems based on agent technologies rarely capitalize on their potentials since their systemic properties— e.g., flexibility, robustness and efficiency—are typically only the byproduct of the (AI) techniques deployed at the implementation level, and are neither explicit object of study nor are taken into consideration at a requirements engineering phase. The paper presents a method, based on graph theory, to exactly compare and evaluate software design system configurations in the engineering of multiagent systems. The theoretical results are presented and validated on a crisis management scenario.