Multiagent socio-technical systems. An ontological approach

Socio-technical systems constitute a challenge for multiagent systemsas they are complex scenarios in which human and artificial agents share informa-tion, interact and make decisions. For example, the design of an airport requiresto interface information coming from automatic apparatuses as security cameras,conceptual information coming from agents, and normative information whichagents’ behavior must comply with. Thus, in order to design systems that arecapable of assisting human agents in organizing and managing socio-technicalsystems, we need fine grained tools to handle several types of information. Theaim of this paper is to discuss a general framework to describe socio-technicalsystems as cases of complex multiagent systems. In particular, we use a founda-tional ontology to address the problems of interoperability and conceptual analy-sis, we discuss how to interface conceptual information with low level informa-tion obtained by computer vision or perception, and we discuss how to integrateinformation coming from heterogeneous agents.