Norms and institutions have been proposed to regulate multi-agent interactions. However, agents are intrinsically autonomous, and may thus decide whether to comply with norms. On the other hand, besides institutional norms, agents may adopt new norms by establishing commitments with other agents. In this paper, we address these issues by considering an electronic institution that monitors the compliance to norms in an evolving normative framework: norms are used both to regulate an existing environment and to define contracts that make agents' commitments explicit. In particular, we consider the creation of virtual organizations in which agents commit to certain cooperation efforts regulated by appropriate norms. The supervision of norm fulfillment is based on the notion of institutional reality, which is constructed by assigning powers to agents enacting institutional roles. Constitutive rules make a connection between the illocutions of those agents and institutional facts, certifying the occurrence of associated external transactions. Contract specification is based on conditional prescription of obligations. Contract monitoring relies on rules for detecting the fulfillment and violation of those obligations. The implementation of our normative institutional environment is supported by a rule-based inference engine.

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The regulation of the activity of multiple autonomous entities represented in a multi-agent system, in environments with no central design (and thus with no cooperative assumption), is gaining much attention in the research community. Approaches to this concern include the use of norms in so-called normative multi-agent systems and the development of electronic institution frameworks. In this paper we describe our approach towards the development of an electronic institution providing an enforceable normative environment. Within this environment, institutional services are provided that assist agents in forming cooperative structures whose commitments are made explicit through contracts. Our normative framework borrows some concepts from contract law theory. Contracts are formalized using norms which are used by the institution while monitoring agents' activities, thus making our normative environment dynamic. We regard the electronic institution as a means to facilitate both the creation and the enforcement of contracts between agents. A model of ''institutional reality'' is presented that allows for monitoring the fulfillment of norms. The paper also distinguishes our approach from other developments of the electronic institution concept. We address the application of our proposal in the B2B field, namely regarding the formation of Virtual Organizations.

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