Description of the Conference Management System Scenario used in this Gaia Role Example
Let us consider an agent-based system for supporting the process of producing the technical program for an international conference. The process may be subdivided into three phases:
- The submission phase: the program committee chair (PC Chair) and the organizer distribute the call for papers. The authors submit their papers. The papers are classified (according to specific criteria), a submission number is assigned to each paper and the authors are notified about that.
- The review phase: the PC Chair distributes the papers among the PC Members which are in charge of providing reviews for those papers. The PC Chair collects back reviews, decides upon the acceptance/rejection of papers, and eventually notifies authors of the decision. Considering all the accepted papers, the PC Chair prepares the conference program.
- The publishing phase: the authors of the accepted papers have to produce a revised version of their papers. The publisher has to collect these final versions and compose the proceedings.
The process clearly involves three loosely interacting phases, each involving different actors, and naturally leads to conceiving one MAS for supporting the activities of each phases. There, personal agents will be naturally associated to the actors involved in the process (authors, PC Chair, PC Members, reviewers) to support their work. It is also natural that the roles played by each agent reflect the ones played by the associated actor in the conference organization. This may require agents to interact both directly with each other (according to patterns that will reflect the patterns of interactions in the real-world organizations), and indirectly (via exchanges of papers and review forms).
Roles Model
The analysis phase can clearly identify the tasks and the structure of the roles, independently of any contingent choice for the organizational structure, but based on the functional specifications only. Therefore, in the organization of the review process there exists a few clearly identifiable functional roles: the role in charge of selecting reviewers and assigning papers to them (ReviewCatcher), the role of filling review forms for assigned papers (Reviewer), the role in charge of collecting and ranking the reviews (ReviewCollector) and the role of finalizing the technical program (DoProgram). An example of role schema for the ReviewCatcher role is presented in the attached file.
Clearly, depending on the actual organizational structures chosen to fit the conference size, different actors (e.g., the PC Chair, the PC Members or External Reviewers) may be called to play such roles.
source: Reference of Dealing with Adaptive Multi-agent Organizations in the Gaia Methodology |
