Human social relationships imply conforming to the norms, behaviors, and cultural values of the society, but also socialization of emotions, to learn how to interpret and show them. In multiagent systems, much progress has been made in the analysis and interpretation of both emotions and norms. Nonetheless, the relationship between emotions and norms has hardly been considered and most normative agents do not consider emotions, or vice-versa. In this article, we provide an overview of relevant aspects within the area of normative agents and emotional agents. First we focus on the concept of norm, the different types of norms, its life cycle and a review of multiagent normative systems. Second, we present the most relevant theories of emotions, the life cycle of an agent’s emotions, and how emotions have been included through computational models in multiagent systems. Next, we present an analysis of proposals that integrate emotions and norms in multiagent systems. From this analysis, four relationships are detected between norms and emotions, which we analyze in detail and discuss how these relationships have been tackled in the reviewed proposals. Finally, we present a proposal for an abstract architecture of a Normative Emotional Agent that covers these four norm-emotion relationships.

Open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are formed by autonomous and heterogeneous agents that may pursue different and even conflicting goals. Therefore, no assumption can be a priori made about their behaviours. Thus, it is needed to constrain the potential excesses of agent autonomous behaviour by means of regulation of agent interaction. Because of this, ‘social’ notions, such as organizations, institutions and norms, have been introduced in the MAS research as coordination and cooperation mechanisms. However, there is still a need to define frameworks which take these organizational abstractions into account. With this aim, this work describes a model of norms for agent organizations that covers both institutional and interaction levels, as well as different types of norms (i.e. constitutive, regulative and procedural norms). This model of norms has been implemented in a specific multi-agent platform, named THOMAS (Methods, Techniques and Tools for Open Multi-Agent Systems), which provides a suitable framework for the management of agent organizations.

Virtual Organizations are a specific type of Multi-Agent Systems that look for modeling agent organizations by means of elements typically used in Organizational Theory, such as roles, organizational goals, or services. The Organizational Theory considers that the structure of a human organization is likely to change through time, being the external and internal forces that drive organizational change the most important source for change. This work presents a set of guidelines that will help MAS designers and developers how to deal with these forces, in order to take advantage of them, or to avoid damage to the organization.

This work presents an extension of the Environment Dimension of the Virtual Organization Model, which is an Organization Modeling Language to define Organization-Centered Multi-Agent Systems. This extension allows this model to regulate the environment by supporting artifacts for organizational mechanisms, an approach based on the Agents & Artifacts conceptual framework. The three main entities of this framework are agents, artifacts and workspaces, which have been integrated in this work inside the Virtual Organization Model. Additionally, this paper presents an application to the health care setting and an analysis of the related work on this topic.

Organizational mechanisms can be introduced in a multi-agent system with the aim of influencing the behavior of agents to achieve their objectives in a proper way. Thus, they are designed to achieve a better coordination between agents. In this paper, we propose to model organizational mechanisms by means of artifacts, which were presented within the Agents & Artifacts approach, and that present good advantages for coordinating agents environments. We claim that artifacts, as reactive entities located into the environment of a Multi-agent System, can help agents to reach their goals, seem to be a suitable abstraction for modeling organizational mechanisms. We also give some examples of possible uses.

One of the main critical problems in manufacturing system domains is the production scheduling process, because an agile and reactive production planning and scheduling system is essential in manufacturing. The production scheduling process is a complex problem in which finding a suitable production scheduling can greatly increase the effectiveness of highly flexible production processes. Nevertheless, this high flexibility makes the production scheduling and acquisition of relevant data quite complicated. Therefore, there is a strong demand for a universal and flexible tool for production scheduling capable of increasing the utilization of resources and that supports a decision-making process for the selection of production orders. In this paper, a flexible and adaptive scheduling tool (FAST) to develop an adaptable, fault-tolerant, and scalable scheduling system for a manufacturing environment is presented. This approach is based on multiagent systems (MAS), which provide a natural way to solve problems in domains of this kind.