Specification and verification of institutions through status functions

Abstract

Institutions have been proposed as a means to regulate open interaction systems by introducing a set of norms (involving deontic positions like authorizations, obligations, prohibitions, and permissions) and to define the ontology of the context in which agents interact. To better clarify the interdependence existing among deontic positions and the ontology defined by each institution, in this paper we propose to model institutions in terms of status functions imposed on agents and defined as aggregates of deontic positions. We present a metamodel which describes the concepts necessary to specify an institution and FIEVeL, a language that can be used to formalize institutions. Finally, we discuss how to automatically translate FIEVeL specifications into the input language of the SPIN model checker and the kind of properties that it is possible to check. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.