Skeletal Jade Components for the Construction of Institutions

We present yet another implementation of the Fish Market auction institution [10,7,9], but in which the focus is on the process of its development and the tools that are employed, rather than the outcome itself. Our starting point is the institution specification language (ISLANDER) first presented in [4] (see [2] for more detail) and the target environment is the JADE [1] agent platform. The methodology has been to construct an implementation of the Fish Market directly in Jade, while at the same time relating the components under construction to the specification of the institution, which includes the interaction scenes, the conversation graphs and the ontology for the speech acts. Our objective is to "close the loop" between the specification language and the corresponding (JADE) components in order to extract parameterizable skeletal components which may then be re-used in the construction of new institutions, creating another feed back loop. In this paper, we report on the construction of this new Fish Market, which includes the auctions without auctioneers protocol reported in [3], and on the relationship between the fundamental terms in the institutional specification language and JADE components which implement the corresponding behaviour as a first step towards a tool for the rapid prototyping of institutions from their specification.