Multi-agent Systems as Electronic Institutions

As the complexity of real-world applications increases, particularly with the advent of the Internet, there is a need to incorporate organisational abstractions into computing systems that ease their design, development, and maintenance. Electronic institutions are at the heart of this approach. Electronic institutions provide a computational analogue of human organisations in which human and intelligent agents playing different organisational roles interact to accomplish individual and organisational goals. In this paper we introduce an integrated development environment that supports the engineering of a particular type of distributed systems, namely multi-agent systems, as electronic institutions. keywords: multi-agent systems, electronic institutions, software engineering, auctions