Agents Enacting Social Roles. Balancing Formal Structure and Practical Rationality in MAS Design

We introduce an integrated approach to the conceptualisation, implementation and evaluation of a MAS (multi-agent system) which is based on sociological concepts of practical roles and organisational coordination via negotiations. We propose a middle level of scale, located between interaction and the overall organisational structure, as the starting point for MAS design, with formal and practical modes of coordination to be distinguished over all relevant levels of scale. In our contribution, we present the modelling principles of our MAS, the agent architecture and the implementation. In the next step the approach is extended to a methodology for the investigation of processes of hybridisation, which means the re-entering of artificial sociality in a real-world domain. The integrated approach is intended to contribute to a generalised understanding of the Socionics program, which in our view should be seen as the enrolment of independent, but subsequent steps in an overall interdisciplinary approach.