Implementing norms in electronic institutions

Ideally, open multi-agent systems (MAS) involve heterogeneous and autonomous agents whose interactions ought to conform to some shared conventions. The challenge is how to express and enforce such conditions so that truly autonomous agents can adscribe to them. One way of addressing this issue is to look at MAS as environments regulated by some sort of normative framework. There have been significant contributions to the formal aspects of such normative frameworks, but there are few proposals that have made them operational. In this paper a possible step towards closing that gap is suggested. A normative language is introduced which is expressive enough to represent the familiar types of MAS-inspired normative frameworks; its implementation in JESS is also shown. This proposal is aimed at adding flexibility and generality to electronic institutions by extending their deontic components through richer types of norms that can still be enforced on-line.

[1]  A. Roadmapof.  A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development , 1995 .

[2]  Eugénio C. Oliveira,et al.  Virtual Enterprise Normative Framework Within Electronic Institutions , 2004, ESAW.

[3]  Marco Colombetti,et al.  A Communicative Act Library in the context of Artificial Institutions , 2004 .

[4]  David C. Parkes,et al.  Specifying and monitoring market mechanisms using rights and obligations , 2004, AAMAS'04.

[5]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Designing a Deontic Logic of Deadlines , 2004, DEON.

[6]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Meeting the Deadline: Why, When and How , 2004, FAABS.

[7]  Ken Arnold,et al.  The Java programming language (2nd ed.) , 1998 .

[8]  Michael Luck,et al.  Constraining autonomy through norms , 2002, AAMAS '02.

[9]  Wamberto Weber Vasconcelos,et al.  A Distributed Architecture for Norm-Aware Agent Societies , 2005, DALT.

[10]  Fabiola. LoÌpez y LoÌpez.  Social power and norms : impact on agent behaviour , 2003 .

[11]  Carl Hewitt,et al.  Offices are open systems , 1986, TOIS.

[12]  Alexander Artikis,et al.  A Protocol for Resource Sharing in Norm-Governed Ad Hoc Networks , 2004, DALT.

[13]  Alexander Artikis.  Executable specification of open norm-governed computational systems , 2003 .

[14]  Javier Vázquez-Salceda,et al.  Norms in Multiagent Systems: some Implementation Guidelines , 2004 .

[15]  Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar,et al.  On the design and construction of agent-mediated institutions , 2001 .

[16]  Pablo Cayetano Noriega Blanco-Vigil.  Agent mediated auctions: the fishmarket metaphor , 1998 .

[17]  Marc Esteva,et al.  AMELI: an agent-based middleware for electronic institutions , 2004, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2004. AAMAS 2004..