Programming electronic institutions with Utopia

Abstract

In Multi-Agent Systems, Organizations are means to structure cooperation and collaboration between agents. MoiseInst is a normative Organization model giving the possibility to constraint agents behaviour according to four dimensions (structural, functional, contextual and normative). Mabeli as Electronic Institution model allows the supervision of MoiseInst Organizations compliance through an arbitration system. The difficulty is to easily instantiate such Organizations to obtain a dynamic entity in which agents can evolve. In this paper we introduce Utopia, our Institution-oriented and Institution-based programming framework. Utopia permits to easily and automatically set up a MAS thanks to a XML MoiseInst Specification file. The framework convert this file into an innovative mathematical structure namely a recursive graph, and solve several optimization problems in order to compute the most efficient role distribution. We show a concrete application of the prototype through RED, an EUREKA/CELTIC European project use-case. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.