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2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

18. Modelling Agent Institutions

Authors : Nicoletta Fornara, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Pablo Noriega, Eugénio Oliveira, Charalampos Tampitsikas, Michael I. Schumacher

Published in: Agreement Technologies

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

Everyday uses of the notion of institution and some typical institutions have been studied and formalized by economists and philosophers. Borrowing from these everyday understandings, and influenced by their formalizations, the notion of institution has been used within the agents community to model and implement a variety of socio-technical systems. Their main purpose is to enable and regulate the interaction among autonomous agents in order to achieve some collective endeavour. In this chapter we present and compare three frameworks for agent-based institutions (i) ANTE, a model that considers electronic institutions as computational realizations of adaptive artificial environments for governing multi-agent interactions; (ii) OCeAN, extended in MANET, a model for specifying Artificial Institutions (AIs), situated in agent environments, which can be used in the design and implementation of different open interaction systems; and (iii) a conceptual core model for Electronic Institutions (EIs), extended with EIDE, based on open, social, decomposable and dialogical interactions. Open challenges in the specifications and use of institutions for the realization of real open interaction systems are discussed.

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previous chapter Describing Agent Organisations

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The IIIA model of Electronic Institutions is the result, mainly, of three dissertations (Noriega 1999; Rodriguez-Aguilar 2003; Esteva 2003).

We will deal with to this ubiquity of a given agent as agent processes that stem from it, so that we have an objective ground for concurrency and control issues when implementing the institutional infrastructure.

Messages make reference to an application domain and should be properly “anchored” (their meaning and pragmatics should be established and shared by participants), e.g. the term “pay” entails the real action of transferring funds in some agreed upon way; in a trial, the constant “exhibit A” corresponds to some object that is so labeled and available at the trial.

Agents cannot interact directly with one another, they use an agent communication language (like JADE) to interact with their governors who mediate their interactions inside the electronic institution.

ISLANDER allows static verification of a specification. It checks for language integrity (all roles and all terms used in illocutions, constraints and norms are properly specified in the dialogical framework), liveness (roles that participate in a given scene have entry and exit nodes that are connected and may be traversed), protocol accessibility (every state in the graph of a scene is accessible from the initial state and arcs are properly labeled), norm compliance (agents who establish “normative commitments” may reach the scenes where the commitments are due). ISLANDER may be extended to have a strictly declarative expression of scene conventions (Garcia-Camino et al. 2005).

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Based on the same ideas, there is an extension of aBUILDER (Brito et al. 2009) that instead of code skeletons produces a simple human interface that complies with the ISLANDER specification and is displayed dynamically via a web browser at run-time.

In fact, as indicated in Table 18.1 these movements are implemented with five operations, which include the two key actions of entering and leaving the electronic institution.

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Title: Modelling Agent Institutions
Authors: Nicoletta Fornara
Henrique Lopes Cardoso
Pablo Noriega
Eugénio Oliveira
Charalampos Tampitsikas
Michael I. Schumacher
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Book: Agreement Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5582-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-94-007-5583-3

Copyright Year: 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5583-3_18

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