Environment and Agreement Technologies ⋆

The notion of Multi-Agent System (MAS) environment, as remarked by recent literature, has gained a key role, becoming a mediating entity, functioning as enabler but possibly also as a manager and constrainer of agent actions, perceptions, and interactions 1 while addressing the requirements of openness and scalability. According to such a perspective, the environment is not a merely passive source of agent perceptions and target of agent actions which is, actually, the dominant perspective in agency, but a first-class abstraction that can be suitably designed to encapsulate some fundamental functionalities and services, such as coordination and organization, besides agent mobility, communications, security, etc [2]. Then, the environment dimension appears to intersect with all the dimensions that should be addressed to define an agreement between autonomous agents, that is, all the different Agreement Technologies giving support to the building, development and management of agreements in decentralized and open systems between autonomous agents. Those dimensions are the ones related to the development of technologies dealing with: Semantics, Norms, Organizations, Argumentation & Negotiation, and Trust

Architecture of an Institutional Platform for Multi-Agent Systems

International audienceArtificial institutions usually consider that the regulation of the behaviour of the agents is expressed by norms that refer to an institutional reality, that is an institutional interpretation of the environment in which the agents are situated. To be applied on real systems, however, artificial institutions need to advance from the theory to the practice. Such step requires to conceive the institutional platform components that are in charge of building the institutional reality used in the normative regulation of the system. Such components must be connectable to the heterogeneous elements composing the environment and must also be able to accommodate the different normative platforms that regulate the system. This paper proposes the architecture of an institutional platform having these features. It is shown also how the proposed institutional platform can be linked to environmental and normative ones