International audienceIn multi-agent systems, norms are a usual way to regulate the behaviour of autonomous agents. To be stable in different circumstances, norms are specified using high level terms, abstracting from the particular dynamics of the environment where the agents are situated. However, applying these norms requires a proper link with a concrete environment. Detaching that link from the norms themselves provides stability to the normative regulation but raises consistency and flexibility issues. Consistency is achieved when the abstract norms are coherent with the environment under regulation. Flexibility is achieved when different kinds of norms share the same interpretation about the environmental state. These properties are provided in some current works. However, since they are interrelated, there is not, to our knowledge, a single proposal providing all of them. This paper proposes the situated artificial institution (SAI) model to address these three issues—stability, consistency, and flexibility—by conceiving norms as part of institutions that provide, through the process of constitution, a social interpretation of the environmental state. After the presentation of the formalised model of SAI, a case study is used to illustrate and test this approach

International audienceArtificial institutions have been proposed to regulate the acting of the agents in open multi-agent systems (MAS). They are composed of abstractions such as norms, roles, goals, etc. In this paper, we say that an artificial institution is situated when the whole regulation that it performs is based on facts occurring in the environment where agents act. The conceiving of situated institutions is challenging as it requires to situate all abstractions possibly involved in the MAS regulation considering their different natures, semantics, life cycles, etc. This work introduces a conceptual model of a situated artificial institution (SAI), structured along two axes: norms and constitutive rules. While norms are based on status functions, the constitutive rules allow a SAI model to clearly state the conditions for an element of the environment to carry a status function. From a first version of a SAI specification language based on this conceptual model, we discuss its features and illustrate its dynamics through examples

International audienceArtificial Institutions are often considered as systems where the regulation defined through norms is based on an interpretation of the concrete world where the agents are situated and interacting. Such interpretation can be defined through constitutive rules. Although the literature proposes independent approaches for the definition and management of both norms and constitutive rules, they are usually not connected to each other. This paper investigates how to make such a connection, that raises problems of representations and of coupling of independent dynamics (norms and constitutive rules). Our main contribution in this paper is an approach and a formal apparatus to base the regulation provided by the norms on the institutional interpretation of the world provided by constitutive rules as defined in the Situated Artificial Institutions model

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