Engineering open environments with electronic institutions

Nowadays, with the expansion of Internet, there is a need of methodologies and software tools to ease the development of applications where distributed homogeneous entities can participate. Multiagent systems, and electronic institutions in particular, can play a main role in the development of this type of systems. Electronic institutions define the rules of the game in agent societies, by fixing what agents are permitted and forbidden to do and under what circumstances. The goal of this paper is to present EIDE, an integrated development environment for supporting the engineering of multiagent systems as electronic institutions. © Published by Elsevier Ltd.Marc Esteva enjoys a Fulbright/MECD postdoctoral scholarship FU2003-0569. The research reported in this paper is partially supported by the Spanish CICYT project Web-i (2) (TIC-2003-08763-C02-01). The authors would like to thank the IIIA Technological Development Unit's programmers for their valuable contribution to the development of EIDE.Peer Reviewe