E4MAS through electronic institutions

Abstract

Today, the concept of an environment for multi-agent systems is in its pioneering phase. Consequently, the development of supporting software technologies is still rather primitive and environment technologies reflecting a specific world-of-interest to the agent systems are yet to be developed in full. In contrast, environment technologies that focus on the agent system itself have been in the agenda of MAS research from its very start. Electronic institutions are prominent in this respect for they have been conceived as a type of restricted MAS environment and have had an engineering technology developed around them. In this paper we explore how the restrictions currently imposed by electronic institutions may be overcome when they are seen as a part of a larger environment where agents act. In particular, we focus on situating electronic institutions by connecting them to a world-of-interest and how this process can facilitate full-fledged environment engineering. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.