Abstract
Artificial 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.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, component means a software element that encapsulates a set of functions and that can interact with other components in a broader system [21].
- 2.
Among the huge literature in the field, details on norms can be found in [2, 4, 7] and in the COIN series of workshops (http://www.pcs.usp.br/~coin/).
- 3.
In SAI, as in Searle’s work, the expression “status function” means both the status and the corresponding function assigned by the institution to the environmental elements. For example, the agent bob carrying the status function auction winner means that bob has both the status of auction winner and the functions corresponding to such status.
- 4.
As events are supposed to be considered at the individual agent level in normative systems (i.e. they can be related to a triggering agent) [31], it is important to record the agent that causes an event-status function assignment.
- 5.
An implementation of \(\mathsf {CArtAgO}\) is available at cartago.sf.net.
- 6.
An implementation of NPL is available at http://github.com/moise-lang/npl.
- 7.
The implementation of the institutional platform, its interfaces with NPL and CArtAgO, as well as some examples, are available at http://github.com/artificial-institutions/sai.
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de Brito, M., Hübner, J.F., Boissier, O. (2017). Architecture of an Institutional Platform for Multi-Agent Systems. In: An, B., Bazzan, A., Leite, J., Villata, S., van der Torre, L. (eds) PRIMA 2017: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10621. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69131-2_19
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