Actorstructuur

Actorstructuur is a term used in Dutch-language literature to describe the arrangement and interaction of autonomous agents, or actors, within a system. The concept is widely used in fields such as computer science and organizational analysis to study how individual actors influence collective behavior through communication and coordination.

In computing, the actor model treats computation as a set of independent actors that communicate exclusively by sending asynchronous messages. An actor can create new actors, change its own behavior, or send messages to others; actors run concurrently and encapsulate their own state. The actorstructuur of a system is the pattern of actors, their creation relationships, and the routing of messages between them. This structure supports scalability, fault isolation, and resilience, since failures are contained within actors and do not crash the entire system.

In organizational or social analysis, actorstructuur refers to the network of stakeholders, teams, departments, and external partners, and to how they interact to achieve objectives. An explicit actorstructuur helps reveal communication channels, dependencies, bottlenecks, and governance arrangements, informing design of workflows and coordination mechanisms.

Common design considerations include choosing the right granularity of actors, managing state and persistence, implementing supervision and fault recovery, and ensuring observability through tracing and logging. Popular platforms that implement actorstructuur ideas include Erlang/OTP, Akka (Scala/Java), and Microsoft Orleans.

Related concepts include the actor model, agent-based modeling, and organizational network analysis.