Formalizing a Language for Institutions and Norms

Esteva, Marc; Padget, Julián; Sierra, Carles

doi:10.1007/3-540-45448-9_26

Cited by 107 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Esteva and colleagues [22,23,21,20,57,24,30] have devised a specification language to specify open MAS as electronic institutions (e-institutions). The basic components of an e-institution include those of role (standardised pattern of behaviour), dialogic framework (prescribing the agent interactions), scene (expressing sub-groupings created in the context of a wider system), and normative rule (the 'rules of the game').…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Artikis

Sergot

2009

Logic Journal of IGPL

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Abstract. Multi-agent systems where the agents are developed by parties with competing interests, and where there is no access to an agent's internal state, are often classified as 'open'. The members of such systems may inadvertently fail to, or even deliberately choose not to, conform to the system specification. Consequently, it is necessary to specify the normative relations that may exist between the members, such as permission, obligation, and institutional power. We present a framework being developed for executable specification of open multi-agent systems. We adopt a bird's eye view of these systems, as opposed to an agent's perspective whereby it reasons about how it should act. This paper is devoted to the presentation of various examples from the NetBill protocol formalised in terms of institutional power, permission and obligation. We express the system specification in the Event Calculus and execute the specification by means of a logic programming implementation. We also give several example formalisations of sanctions for dealing with violations of permissions and obligations. We distinguish between an open multi-agent system and the procedure by which an agent enters and leaves the system. We present examples from the specification of a role-management protocol for NetBill, and demonstrate the interplay between such a protocol and the corresponding multi-agent system.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Artikis

Sergot

2009

Logic Journal of IGPL

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“…Esteva and colleagues [13][14][15]20] have developed a systematic approach to the design and development of multi-agent systems which incorporate aspects of conventional behaviour and organisational structures in a formal specification of structured interactions. Such a specification of a multi-agent system is called an Electronic Institution (EI).…”

Section: Electronic Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specifying Open Agent Systems: A Survey

Artikis

Pitt

2009

Engineering Societies in the Agents World IX

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Abstract. Electronic markets, dispute resolution and negotiation protocols are three types of application domain that can be viewed as open agent systems. Members of such systems are developed by different parties and have conflicting goals. Consequently, they may choose not to, or simply fail to, conform to the norms governing their interactions. It has been argued that many practical applications in the future will be realised in terms of open agent systems of this sort. Not surprisingly, recently there is a growing interest in open systems. In this paper we review and compare four approaches for the specification of open systems, pointing out the extent to which they satisfy a set of requirements identified in the literature.

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“…The earliest presentation in the computer science literature is perhaps Noriega's thesis [35], followed by Rodriguez [37] and Vazquez-Salceda [38]. Alongside, there have been several attempts at finding tractable representations of institutional norms, starting from the original FishMarket paper [36] using automata [22], process algebra [29], symbolic model-checking with temporal logics [11], commitments [39], social institutions [41] action languages [2] and answer set programming [10]. Initial approaches were bottom-up, starting from protocols, but to date creating a verifiable relationship between protocols and higher level representations of norms has not proven fruitful.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Answer Set Programming for Representing and Reasoning About Virtual Institutions

Cliffe

Vos

Padget

2007

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. It is recognised that institutions are potentially powerful means for making agent interactions effective and efficient, but institutions will only really be useful when, as in other safety-critical scenarios, it is possible to prove that particular properties do or do not hold for all possible encounters. In contrast to symbolic model-checking, answer set programming permits the statement of problems and queries in domain-specific terms as executable logic programs, thus eliminating the gap between specification and verification language. Furthermore, results are presented in the same terms. In this paper we describe the use of answer set programs as an institutional modelling technique. We demonstrate that our institutional model can be intuitively be mapped into an answer set program such that the ordered event traces of the former can be obtained as the answer sets of the latter, allowing for an easy way to query properties of models.

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Formalizing a Language for Institutions and Norms

Cited by 107 publications

References 13 publications

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Specifying Open Agent Systems: A Survey

Answer Set Programming for Representing and Reasoning About Virtual Institutions

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