Norm consistency in electronic institutions

Abstract

We elaborate on the verification of properties of electronic institutions, a formalism to define and analyse protocols among agents with a view to achieving global and individual goals. We formally define two kinds of norms, viz., the integrity norms and obligations, and provide a computational approach to assess whether an electronic institution is normatively consistent, that is, we can determine whether its norms prevent norm-compliant executions from happening. For this we strongly rely on the analysis of the dialogues that may occur as agents interact. © Springer-Verlag 2004.