Computação n ° 33 / 06 A Middleware for Governance in Open Multi-Agent Systems

Interacting entities in many distributed systems have to follow certain protocols and interaction rules. This paper presents a middleware to regulate agent interactions in systems characterized mainly by the need of having control over the actions that an agent can perform. The solution is based on the ideas proposed in the field of governance of agent systems, where governance can be defined as the set of approaches that aim to establish and enforce some structure, set of norms or conventions, that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make agents more effective in attaining their goals or more predictable.