This paper is a comprehensive presentation of a framework for the modeling, the simulation and the analysis of power relationships in social organizations, and more generally in systems of organized action. This framework relies on, and slightly extends, the Crozier and Freidber's sociology of organized action, which supports a methodology for understanding why, in an organizational context, people behave as they do. SocLab intends to complement the discursive statement of sociological analyses with a formal formulation easing the objectivization of findings. It consists of a meta-model of organizations, a model of bounded-rational social actors and analytical tools for the study of the internal properties of organizations.

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OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID : 14792 This paper presents the experience gained related to the development of an integrated simulation model of water policy. Within this context, we analyze particular difficulties raised by the inclusion of multilevel governance that assigns the responsibility of individual or collective decision-making to a variety of actors, regarding measures of which the implementation has significant effects toward the sustainability of socio-hydrosystems. Multi-level governance procedures are compared with the potential of modelbased impact assessment. Our discussion is illustrated on the basis of the exploitation of the multi-agent platform MAELIA dedicated to the simulation of social, economic and environmental impacts of lowwater management in a context of climate and regulatory changes. We focus on three major decisionmaking processes occurring in the Adour-Garonne basin, France: (i) the participatory development of the Master Scheme for Water Planning and Management (SDAGE) under the auspices of the Water Agency; (ii) the publication of water use restrictions in situations of water scarcity; and (iii) the determination of the abstraction volumes for irrigation and their allocation. The MAELIA platform explicitly takes into account the mode of decision-making when it is framed by a procedure set beforehand, focusing on the actors' participation and on the nature and parameters of the measures to be implemented. It is observed that in some water organizations decision-making follows patterns that can be represented as rule-based actions triggered by thresholds of resource states. When decisions are resulting from individual choice, endowing virtual agents with bounded rationality allows us to reproduce (in silico) their behavior and decisions in a reliable way. However, the negotiation processes taking place during the period of time simulated by the models in arenas of collective choices are not all reproducible. Outcomes of some collective decisions are very little or not at all predictable. The development and simulation of a priori policy scenarios capturing the most plausible or interesting outcomes of such collective decisions on measures for low-water management allows these difficulties to be overcome. The building of these kind of scenarios requires close collaboration between researchers and stakeholders involved in arenas of collective choice, and implies the integration of the production of model and the analysis of scenarios as one component of the polycentric political process of water management.

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OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible.

No abstract

This paper proposes a basis to design coordination models in multiagent systems. This proposal is based on the exploitation of an in-depth exploration of a well-experienced sociological theory, the Sociology of Organized Action. This theory intends to discover the functioning of an organization beyond its formal rules, especially how social actors define the organization that in return rules their behaviours, and which are the mechanisms they use to regulate their interactions. We then first present the concepts developed by this theory to understand the strategic aspects of the actors' behaviours in an organized actions framework. Then we introduce a metamodel that allows us to describe the structure of Concrete Action Systems and how social actors handle its elements. A classical case study is used to illustrate the approach.

Sequence Diagrams (SDs) are one of the most popular elements of the UML notation to model the dynamics of systems. However, the graphical representation of basic SDs suffers from an inherent ambiguity that has led to different definitions in UML 1.x and in UML 2.0. This ambiguity paves the way for the consideration of several semantics for basic SDs. The paper studies four of these semantics and shows to what extent their differences for a given SD (that is the amount of ambiguity of this diagram) comes from its structural properties (linearity, local control and local causality). The fulfilment of these properties can serve as a measure of the ambiguity of a SD, and thus the attention to be paid at its validation.