Exception Handling in Multiagent Organizations: Playing with JaCaMo

Agent organizations offer powerful abstractions to build distributed systems. Current models, however, lack of a systematic way to address exceptions as part of their design. Thus, exception handling is usually approached by ad-hoc solutions, that hamper code modularization and decoupling. We present an extension of the organizational model and infrastructure adopted in JaCaMo, that explicitly encompasses the notion of exception as a first-class element in the design of an organization. Relying on such a model, we propose an exception handling mechanism that is seamlessly integrated with organizational concepts, such as responsibilities, goals and norms.