Modelling Agent Institutions

Abstract

Everyday uses of the notion of institution and some typical institutions have been studied and formalized by economists and philosophers. Borrowing from these everyday understandings, and influenced by their formalizations, the notion of institution has been used within the agents community to model and implement a variety of socio-technical systems. Their main purpose is to enable and regulate the interaction among autonomous agents in order to achieve some collective endeavour. In this chapter we present and compare three frameworks for agent-based institutions (i) ANTE, a model that considers electronic institutions as computational realizations of adaptive artificial environments for governing multi-agent interactions; (ii) OCeAN, extended in MANET, a model for specifying Artificial Institutions (AIs), situated in agent environments, which can be used in the design and implementation of different open interaction systems; and (iii) a conceptual core model for Electronic Institutions (EIs), extended with EIDE, based on open, social, decomposable and dialogical interactions. Open challenges in the specifications and use of institutions for the realization of real open interaction systems are discussed.