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Modelling Agent Institutions

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Agreement Technologies

Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 8))

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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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/.

  2. 2.

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

  3. 3.

    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.

  4. 4.

    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.

  5. 5.

    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.

  6. 6.

    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).

  7. 7.

    The current implementation of the infrastructure can either use JADE or a publish-subscribe event model as communication layer. When employing JADE, the execution of AMELI can be readily distributed among different machines, permitting the scalability of the infrastructure. Notice that the model is communication-neutral since agents are not affected by changes in the communication layer.

  8. 8.

    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.

  9. 9.

    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.

  10. 10.

    http://www.foaf-project.org/.

  11. 11.

    http://linkeddata.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Hasler Foundation project n. 11115-KG, by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research projects n. C08.0114 and “Open Interaction Frameworks, towards a Governing Environment”, the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under project PTDC/EIA-EIA/104420/2008, the Consolider AT project CSD2007-0022 INGENIO 2010 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as the Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Nicoletta Fornara & Charalampos Tampitsikas

  2. LIACC/Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Henrique Lopes Cardoso & Eugénio Oliveira

  3. IIIA – CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

    Pablo Noriega

  4. University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Sierre, Switzerland

    Charalampos Tampitsikas & Michael I. Schumacher

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  1. Nicoletta Fornara
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  2. Henrique Lopes Cardoso
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Correspondence to Nicoletta Fornara .

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    Sascha Ossowski

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Fornara, N., Cardoso, H.L., Noriega, P., Oliveira, E., Tampitsikas, C., Schumacher, M.I. (2013). Modelling Agent Institutions. In: Ossowski, S. (eds) Agreement Technologies. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5583-3_18

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