Implementing norms in electronic institutions

Abstract

Ideally, open multi-agent systems (MAS) involve heterogeneous and autonomous agents whose interactions ought to conform to some shared conventions. The challenge is how to express and enforce such conditions so that truly autonomous agents can adscribe to them. One way of addressing this issue is to look at MAS as environments regulated by some sort of normative framework. There have been significant contributions to the formal aspects of such normative frameworks, but there are few proposals that have made them operational, in this paper a possible step towards closing that gap is suggested. A normative language is introduced which is expressive enough to represent the far miliar types of MAS-inspired normative frameworks; its implementation in JESS is also shown. This proposal is aimed at adding flexibility and generality to electronic institutions by extending their deontic components through richer types of norms that can still be enforced on-line. Copyright 2005 ACM.