Multi agent simulation for control and autonomy in complex socio-technical systems

Socio-technical systems are characterized by the autonomy of the individual participants that however must be able to collaborate in complex, dynamic environments. The design and analysis of such systems requires models that balance control and autonomy. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework to integrate organizational and individual perspectives, such that agent-based models for simulation and the engineering of multi-agent systems can be intergrated. This framework distinguishes between the mechanisms though which the structure and global behavior of the model is described and coordinated, and the service-providers (agents) that populate the model. We use the MASQ meta-model that distinguishes the dimension internal-external and individual-collective as a basis for our work and present modeling proposals for all its components.