Multiagent socio-technical systems: An ontological approach

Socio-technical systems constitute a challenge for multiagent systems as they are complex scenarios in which human and artificial agents share information, interact and make decisions. For example, the design of an airport requires to interface information coming from automatic apparatuses as security cameras, conceptual information coming from agents, and normative information which agents' behavior must comply with. Thus, in order to design systems that are capable of assisting human agents in organizing and managing socio-technical systems, we need fine grained tools to handle several types of information. The aim of this paper is to discuss a general framework to describe socio-technical systems as cases of complex multiagent systems. In particular, we use a foundational ontology to address the problems of interoperability and conceptual analysis, we discuss how to interface conceptual information with low level information obtained by computer vision or perception, and we discuss how to integrate information coming from heterogeneous agents. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.