OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluating organizational configurations

n/

Designing for planned emergence in multi-agent systems

We present an approach for designing organization-oriented multi-agent systems (MASs) to allow improvisation at run time when agents are not available to exactly match the original organizational design structure. Working with system components from an existing MAS organizational meta-model, OJAzzIC, the approach sets out five stages for the design process. We illustrate the design approach with an incident response scenario implemented in the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) environment, and show how agents at runtime can improvise- for example they can adopt tasks even if those tasks do not precisely match a predefined role. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Accountability for Practical Reasoning Agents

Postprin

Ubi Lex Ibi Poena: Designing Norm Enforcement in Electronic Institutions

The viability of the application of the e-Institution paradigm for obtaining overall desired behavior in open multiagent systems (MAS) lies in the possibility of bringing the norms of the institution to have an actual impact on the MAS. Institutional norms have to be implemented in the society. The paper addresses two possible views on implementing norms, the so-called regimentation of norms, and the enforcement of norms, with particular attention to this last one. Aim of the paper is to provide a theory for the understanding of the notion of enforcement and for the design of enforcement mechanisms in e-Institutions

Ubi lex, ibi poena: Designing norm enforcement in e-institutions

Abstract. The viability of the application of the e-Institution paradigm for obtaining overall desired behavior in open multiagent systems (MAS) lies in the possibility of bringing the norms of the institution to have an actual impact on the MAS. Institutional norms have to be implemented in the society. The paper addresses two possible views on implementing norms, the so-called regimentation of norms, and the enforcement of norms, with particular attention to this last one. Aim of the paper is to provide a theory for the understanding of the notion of enforcement and for the design of enforcement mechanisms in e-Institutions.

Ontological aspects of the implementation of norms in agent-based electronic institutions

Abstract In order to regulate different circumstances over an extensive period of time, norms in institutions are stated in a vague and often ambiguous manner, thereby abstracting from concrete aspects, which are relevant for the operationalisation of institutions. If agent-based electronic institutions, which adhere to a set of abstract requirements, are to be built, how can those requirements be translated into more concrete constraints, the impact of which can be described directly in the institution? We address this issue considering institutions as normative systems based on articulate ontologies of the agent domain they regulate. Ontologies, we hold, are used by institutions to relate the abstract concepts in which their norms are formulated, to their concrete application domain. In this view, different institutions can implement the same set of norms in different ways as far as they presuppose divergent ontologies of the concepts in which that set of norms is formulated. In this paper we analyse this phenomenon introducing a notion of contextual ontology. We will focus on the formal machinery necessary to characterise it as well.