Specifying open agent systems: A survey
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paper_title: Open Multi-Agent Systems: Agent Communication and Integration

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In this paper, we study the open-ended nature of multi-agent systems, which refers to the property of allowing the dynamic integration of new agents into an existing system. In particular, the focus of this study is on the issues of agent communication and integration. We define an abstract programming language for open multi-agent systems that is based on concepts and mechanisms as introduced and studied in concurrency theory. Moreover, an important ingredient is the generalisation of the traditional concept of value-passing to a communication mechanism that allows for the exchange of information. Additionally, an operational model for the language is given in terms of a transition system, which allows the formal derivation of computations.
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paper_title: A formal road from institutional norms to organizational structures

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Up to now, the way institutions and organizations have been used in the development of open systems has not often gone further than a useful heuristics. In order to develop systems actually implementing institutions and organizations, formal methods should take the place of heuristic ones. The paper presents a formal semantics for the notion of institution and its components (abstract and concrete norms, empowerment of agents, roles) and defines a formal relation between institutions and organizational structures. As a result, it is shown how institutional norms can be refined to constructs---organizational structures---which are closer to an implemented system. It is also shown how such a refinement process can be fully formalized and it is therefore amenable to rigorous verification.
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paper_title: New Developments in Ontology-Based Policy Management: Increasing the Practicality and Comprehensiveness of KAoS

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The KAoS policy management framework pioneered the use of semantically-rich ontological representation and reasoning to specify, analyze, deconflict, and enforce policies [9, 10]. The framework has continued to evolve over the last five years, inspired by both technological advances and the practical needs of its varied applications. In this paper, we describe how these applications have motivated the partitioning of components into a well-defined three-layer policy management architecture that hides ontology complexity from the human user and from the policy-governed system. The power of semantic reasoning is embedded in the middle layer of the architecture where it can provide the most benefit. We also describe how the policy semantics of the core KAoS policy ontology has grown in its comprehensiveness. The flexible and mature architecture of KAoS enables straightforward integration with a variety of deployment platforms, ranging from highly distributed systems, such as the AFRL information management system, to human-robotic interaction, to dynamic management of quality-of-service and cross-domain information management of wireless networks in resource-constrained or security-sensitive environments.
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paper_title: Amongst first-class protocols

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The ubiquity of our increasingly distributed and complex computing environments have necessitated the development of programming approaches and paradigms that can automatically manage the numerous tasks and processes involved. Hence, research into agency and multi-agent systems are of more and more interest as an automation solution. Coordination becomes a central issue in these environments. The most promising approach is the use of interaction protocols. Interaction protocols specify the interaction or social norms for the participating agents. However the orthodoxy see protocols as rigid specifications that are defined a priori. A recent development in this field of research is the specification of protocols that are treated as first-class computational entities. This paper explores the most prominent approaches and compares them.
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paper_title: Open information systems semantics for distributed artificial intelligence

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Abstract Distributed Artificial Intelligence (henceforth called DAI) deals with issues of large-scale Open Systems (i.e. systems which are always subject to unanticipated outcomes in their operation and which can receive new information from outside themselves at any time). Open Information Systems (henceforth called OIS) are Open Systems that are implemented using digital storage, operations, and communications technology. OIS Semantics aims to provide a scientific foundation for understanding such large-scale OIS projects and for developing new technology. The literature of DAI speaks of many important concepts such as commitment, conflict, negotiation, cooperation, distributed problem solving, representation , etc. However there is currently no framework for comparing the usage of such concepts in one publication with usage in other publications. Open Information System Semantics (henceforth called OIS Semantics) is a step toward remedying this problem by providing a framework which integrates methods from Sociology with methods from Concurrent Systems Science into a foundation that provides a framework for analyzing previous work in DAI and a powerful foundation for its further development. Deduction, one of the most powerful and well-understood methods for information systems, has recently been applied to foundational issues in DAI thereby raising important new issues and problems above and beyond those of applying deduction to the problems of classical AI. OIS Semantics provides answers to many important questions about the uses of deduction in OIS. It provides a characterization of Deduction that encompasses N th-Order Logics, Meta-theories, Modal Logics, Circumscription, Default Logic, Autoepistemic Logic, Restricted Scope Nonmonotonic Logics, etc. OIS Semantics develops the concept of Deductive Indecision as a fundamental aspect of Deductive systems, thereby characterizing the scope and limits of Deduction for operational and representational activities in OIS. Negotiations play a fundamental role in OIS Semantics. They are creative processes that go beyond the capabilities of Deduction. OIS Semantics characterizes the role of Negotiation as a powerful method for increasing understanding of large-scale OIS projects. The ambitious goal of OIS Semantics for DAI is to provide an integrated foundation for Sociology and Concurrent Systems Science. This paper provides a snapshot of where we currently stand in the process of developing these foundations
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paper_title: Agent communication languages: rethinking the principles

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Agent communication languages have been used for years in proprietary multiagent systems. Yet agents from different vendors-or even different research projects-cannot communicate with each other. The author looks at the underlying reasons and proposes a conceptual shift from individual agent representations to social interaction.
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paper_title: The Deontic Component of Action Language n C+

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The action language ${\mathcal{C}}+$ of Giunchiglia, Lee, Lifschitz, McCain, and Turner is a formalism for specifying and reasoning about the effects of actions and the persistence (‘inertia') of facts over time. An ‘action description' in ${\mathcal{C}}+$ defines a labelled transition system of a certain kind. $n{\mathcal{C}}+$ (formerly known as $({\mathcal{C}}+)^{++}$) is an extended form of ${\mathcal{C}}+$ designed for representing normative and institutional aspects of (human or computer) societies. The deontic component of $n{\mathcal{C}}+$ provides a means of specifying the permitted (acceptable, legal) states of a transition system and its permitted (acceptable, legal) transitions. We present this component of $n{\mathcal{C}}+$, motivating its details with reference to some small illustrative examples.
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paper_title: Modeling communicative behavior using permissions and obligations

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In order to provide flexible control over agent communication, we propose an integrated approach that involves using positive and negative permissions and obligations to describe both conversation specifications and policies. Conversation specifications are described in terms of the speech acts that an agent can/cannot/must/must not perform based on the sequence of messages received and sent. On the other hand, conversation policies restrict how the specifications are used and are defined over the attributes of the sender, receiver, message content, and context in general. Other policies like management, social, privacy etc. are defined at a higher level of abstraction and restrict the general behavior of agents. Whenever they deal with communication, the higher level policies are translated into conversation policies using the syntax and semantics of the specific communication language being used. Agents use a policy engine for reasoning over conversation specifications and applicable policies in order to decide what communicative act to perform next. Our work is different from existing research in communication policies because it is not tightly coupled to any domain information such as mental states of agents or specific communicative acts.The main contributions of this work include (i) an extensible framework that can support varied domain knowledge and different agent communication languages, and (ii) the declarative representation of conversation specifications and policies in terms of permitted and obligated speech acts.
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paper_title: Role-assignment in open agent societies

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Open systems are characterized by heterogeneous participants which can enter or leave the system at will. Typical examples are e-commerce applications or information agent systems. Agents (e.g. personal assistants for buying things on the Internet) will only temporarily take up roles (e.g. a buyer in on-line auctions). This creates the need to define precisely what it means that an agent "takes up" a role and "enacts" it. In this paper we present ongoing research on the determination of the conditions under which an agent can enact a role and what it means for the agent to enact a role. We define possible relations between roles and agents and discuss architectural and functional changes that an agent must undergo when it enters an open agent system.
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paper_title: ORGANISATIONAL RULES AS AN ABSTRACTION FOR THE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

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Multi-agent systems can very naturally be viewed as computational organisations. For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions offer a promising set of metaphors and models that can be exploited in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concept of role models is increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts - organisational rules , organisational structures, and organisational patterns - and discuss why we believe they are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations. In particular, we focus on the concept of organisational rules and introduce a formalism, based on temporal logic, to specify them. This formalism is then used to drive the definition of the organisational structure and the identification of the organisational patterns. Finally, the paper sketches some guidelines for a methodology for agent-oriented systems based on our expanded set of organisational abstractions.
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paper_title: Rules of encounter: designing conventions for automated negotiation among computers

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Part 1 Machines that make deals: the premise machine encounters social engineering for machines scenarios how does this differ from Al? how does this differ from game theory? Part 2 Interaction mechanisms: the negotiation problem in different domains attributes of negotiation mechanisms assumptions incentive compatibility. Part 3 Task-oriented domains: domain definition attributes and examples a negotiation mechanism evaluation of the negotiation mechanism an alternative, one-step protocol mechanisms that maximize the product of utilities the bottom line. Part 4 Deception-free protocols: non-manipulable negotiation mechanisms probabilistic deals subadditive domains concave domains modular domains summary of incentive compatible mechanisms the bottom line. Part 5 State-oriented domains: side-effects in encounters domain definition attributes and examples a negotiation mechanism worth of a goal conflict resolution semi-co-operative deals in non-conflict situations unified negotiation protocols (UNP) multi-plan deals the hierarchy of deal types - summary unbounded worth of a goal - tidy agents the bottom line. Part 6 Strategic manipulation: negotiation with incomplete information incomplete information about worth of goals using the revelation principle to re-design the mechanisms the bottom line. Part 7 Worth-oriented domains: goal relaxation domain definition one agent best plan negotiation over sub-optimal states examples of worth functions the bottom line. Appendices: strict/tolerant mechanisms some related work proofs.
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paper_title: The ontological properties of social roles in multi-agent systems: definitional dependence, powers and roles playing roles

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In this paper we address the problem of defining social roles in multi-agent systems. Social roles provide the basic structure of social institutions and organizations. We start from the properties attributed to roles both in the multi-agent systems and the Object Oriented community, and we use them in an ontological analysis of the notion of social role. We identify three main properties of social roles. First, they are definitionally dependent on the institution they belong to, i.e. the definition of a role is given inside the definition of the institution. Second, they attribute powers to the agents playing them, like creating commitments for the institutions and the other roles. Third, they allow roles to play roles, in the same way as agents do. Using Input/Output logics, we propose a formalization of roles in multi-agent systems satisfying the three properties we identified.
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paper_title: Security policies for sharing knowledge in virtual communities

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Knowledge management exploits the new opportunities of sharing knowledge among members of virtual communities in distributed computer networks, and knowledge-management systems are therefore modeled and designed as multiagent systems. In this paper, normative multiagent systems for secure knowledge management based on access-control policies are studied. It is shown how distributed access control is realized by means of local policies of access-control systems for documents of knowledge providers, and by means of global community policies regulating these local policies. Moreover, it is shown how such a virtual community of multiple knowledge providers respects the autonomy of the knowledge providers
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paper_title: Law-governed interaction: a coordination and control mechanism for heterogeneous distributed systems

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Software technology is undergoing a transition form monolithic systems, constructed according to a single overall design, into conglomerates of semiautonomous, heterogeneous, and independently designed subsystems, constructed and managed by different organizations, with little, if any, knowledge of each other. Among the problems inherent in such conglomerates, none is more serious than the difficulty to control the activities of the disparate agents operating in it, and the difficulty for such agents to coordinate their activities with each other. We argue that the nature of coordination and control required for such systems calls for the following principles to be satisfied: (1) coordination policies need to be enforced: (2) the enforcement needs to be decentralized; and (3) coordination policies need to be formulated explicitly—rather than being implicit in the code of the agents involved—and they should be enforced by means of a generic, broad spectrum mechanism; and (4) it should be possible to deploy and enforce a policy incrementally, without exacting any cost from agents and activities not subject to it. We describe a mechansim called law-governed interaction (LGI), currently implemented by the Moses toolkit, which has been designed to satisfy these principles. We show that LGI is at least as general as a conventional centralized coordination mechanism (CCM), and that it is more scalable, and generally more efficient, then CCM.
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paper_title: A Social Semantics for Agent Communication Languages

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The ability to communicate is one of the salient properties of agents. Although a number of agent communication languages (ACLs) have been developed, obtaining a suitable formal semantics for ACLs remains one of the greatest challenges of multiagent systems theory. Previous semantics have largely been mentalistic in their orientation and are based solely on the beliefs and intentions of the participating agents. Such semantics are not suitable for most multiagent applications, which involve autonomous and heterogeneous agents, whose beliefs and intentions cannot be uniformly determined. Accordingly, we present a social semantics for ACLs that gives primacy to the interactions among the agents. Our semantics is based on social commitments and is developed in temporal logic. This semantics, because of its public orientation, is essential to providing a rigorous basis for multiagent protocols.
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paper_title: On Computational Social Laws for Dynamic Non-Homogeneous Social Structures

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Abstract Approaches to the coordination of artificial agents may be inspired by observations on human and other natural societies. On the other hand, the introduction and the analysis of general computational models and mechanisms of coordination may shed light on the general theory of coordination. This paper extends a fundamental approach to the coordination of artificial agent societies, the artificial social systems approach, in order to incorporate several features observed in human societies. As a result, the approach becomes more powerful, and illuminating computational results are obtained. An artificial social system is a basic mechanism of coordination. It decreases the need for both centralized control and on-line resolution of conflicts by introducing a set of social laws that enable agents to work individually in a mutually compatible manner. This work extends the existing work on artificial social systems in a variety of directions, (a) We present a model that refers explicitly to social law...
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paper_title: Minimal social laws

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Research on social laws in computational environments has proved the usefulness of the law-based approach for the coordination of multi-agent systems. Though researchers have noted that the imposition of a specification could be attained by a variety of different laws, there has been no attempt to identify a criterion for selection among alternative useful social laws. We propose such a criterion which is based on the notion of minimality. A useful social law puts constraints on the agents' actions in such a way that as a result of these constraints, they are able to achieve their goals. A minimal social law is a useful social law that minimizes the amount of constraints the agents shall obey. Minimal social laws give an agent maximal flexibility in choosing a new behavior as a function of various local changes either in his capabilities or in his objectives, without interfering with the other agents. We show that this concept can be usefully applied to a problem in robotics and present a computational study of minimal social laws.
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paper_title: On the synthesis of useful social laws for artificial agent societies

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We present a general model of social law in a computational system, and investigate some of its properties. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the notion of social law is not epiphenomenal, but rather should be built into the action representation; we then offer such a representation. Second, we investigate the complexity of automatically deriving useful social laws in this model, given descriptions of the agents' capabilities, and the goals they might encounter. We show that in general the problem is NP-complete, and identify precise conditions under which it becomes polynomial.
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paper_title: Choosing Social Laws for Multi-Agent Systems: Minimality and Simplicity

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Abstract The design of social laws for artificial agent societies is a basic approach to coordinating multi-agent systems. It exposes the spectrum between fully-centralized and fully-decentralized coordination mechanisms. Useful social laws set constraints on the agents' activities which allow them to work individually in a mutually compatible manner. The design of useful social laws is a problem of considerable importance. In many cases, several useful social laws might be considered, and we might wish to have some criteria in order to choose among them. In this paper, we present the notions of minimal and simple social laws, which capture two basic criteria for selecting among alternative (useful) social laws, and study these criteria in the framework of basic settings, namely Automated Guided Vehicles and Distributed Computing. We also present results with regard to computational issues related to minimal and simple social laws, and to the relationship between these two concepts. Together, the new insights provided here can be used as a basic framework for the analysis of “good” social laws, and initiate research on the selection among alternative social laws.
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paper_title: Artificial Social Systems

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An artificial social system is a set of restrictions of agents' behaviors in a multi-agent environment. Its role is to allow agents to coexist in a shared environment and pursue their respective goals in the presence of other agents. This paper argues that artificial social systems exist in practically every multi-agent system, and play a major role in the performance and effectiveness of the agents. We propose artificial social systems as an explicit and formal object of study, and investigate several basic issues that arise in their design.
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paper_title: Specifying norm-governed computational societies

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Electronic markets, dispute resolution and negotiation protocols are three types of application domains that can be viewed as open agent societies. Key characteristics of such societies are agent heterogeneity, conflicting individual goals and unpredictable behavior. Members of such societies may fail to, or even choose not to, conform to the norms governing their interactions. It has been argued that systems of this type should have a formal, declarative, verifiable, and meaningful semantics. We present a theoretical and computational framework being developed for the executable specification of open agent societies. We adopt an external perspective and view societies as instances of normative systems. In this article, we demonstrate how the framework can be applied to specifying and executing a contract-net protocol. The specification is formalized in two action languages, the C+ language and the Event Calculus, and executed using respective software implementations, the Causal Calculator and the Society Visualizer. We evaluate our executable specification in the light of the presented case study, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the employed action languages for the specification of open agent societies.
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paper_title: The Role of Competency Questions in Enterprise Engineering

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We present a logical framework for representing activities, states, time, and cost in an enterprise integration architecture. We define ontologies for these concepts in first-order logic and consider the problems of temporal projection and reasoning about the occurrence of actions. We characterize the ontology with the use of competency questions. The ontology must contain a necessary and sufficient set of axioms to represent and solve these questions. These questions not only characterize existing ontologies for enterprise engineering, but also drive the development of new ontologies that are required to solve the competency questions.
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paper_title: Reasoning about Commitments in the Event Calculus: An Approach for Specifying and Executing Protocols

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Commitments among agents are widely recognized as an important basis for organizing interactions in multiagent systems. We develop an approach for formally representing and reasoning about commitments in the event calculus. We apply and evaluate this approach in the context of protocols, which represent the interactions allowed among communicating agents. Protocols are essential in applications such as electronic commerce where it is necessary to constrain the behaviors of autonomous agents. Traditional approaches, which model protocols merely in terms of action sequences, limit the flexibility of the agents in executing the protocols. By contrast, by formally representing commitments, we can specify the content of the protocols through the agents' commitments to one another. In representing commitments in the event calculus, we formalize commitment operations and domain-independent reasoning rules as axioms to capture the evolution of commitments. We also provide a means to specify protocol-specific axioms through the agents' actions. These axioms enable agents to reason about their actions explicitly to flexibly accommodate the exceptions and opportunities that may arise at run time. This reasoning is implemented using an event calculus planner that helps determine flexible execution paths that respect the given protocol specifications.
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paper_title: Contextualizing commitment protocol

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Commitment protocols are modularized specifications of interactions understood in terms of commitments. Purchase is a classic example of a protocol. Although a typical protocol would capture the essence of the interactions desired, in practice, it should be adapted depending on the circumstances or context and the agents' preferences based on that context. For example, when applying purchase in different contexts, it may help to allow sending reminders for payments or returning goods to obtain a refund. We contextualize a protocol by adapting it via different transformations.Our contributions are the following: (1) a protocol is transformed by composing its specification with a transformer specification; (2) contextualization is characterized operationally by relating the original and transformed protocols; and (3) contextualization is related to protocol compliance.
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paper_title: A Modular Action Description Language for Protocol Composition ∗

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Protocols are modular abstractions that capture patterns of interaction among agents. The compelling vision behind protocols is to enable creating customized interactions by refining and composing existing protocols. Realizing this vision presupposes (1) maintaining repositories of protocols and (2) refining and composing selected protocols. To this end, this paper synthesizes recent advances on protocols and on the knowledge representation of actions. This paper presents MAD-P, a modular action description language tailored for protocols. MAD-P enables building an aggregation hierarchy of protocols via composition. This paper demonstrates the value of such compositions via a simplified, but realistic, business scenario.
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paper_title: Flexible protocol specification and execution: applying event calculus planning using commitments

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Protocols represent the allowed interactions among communicating agents. Protocols are essential in applications such as electronic commerce where it is necessary to constrain the behaviors of autonomous agents. Traditional approaches, which model protocols in terms of action sequences, limit the flexibility of the agents in executing the protocols. By contrast, we develop an approach for specifying protocols in which we capture the content of the actions through agents' commitments to one another. We formalize commitments in a variant of the event calculus. We provide operations and reasoning rules to capture the evolution of commitments through the agents' actions. Using these rules in addition to the basic event calculus axioms enables agents to reason about their actions explicitly to flexibly accommodate the exceptions and opportunities that arise at run time. This reasoning is implemented using an event calculus planner that helps us determine flexible execution paths that respect the protocol specifications.
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paper_title: Verifying Compliance with Commitment Protocols

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Interaction protocols are specific, often standard, constraints on the behaviors of autonomous agents in a multiagent system. Protocols are essential to the functioning of open systems, such as those that arise in most interesting web applications. A variety of common protocols in negotiation and electronic commerce are best treated as commitment protocols, which are defined, or at least analyzed, in terms of the creation, satisfaction, or manipulation of the commitments among the participating agents.When protocols are employed in open environments, such as the Internet, they must be executed by agents that behave more or less autonomously and whose internal designs are not known. In such settings, therefore, there is a risk that the participating agents may fail to comply with the given protocol. Without a rigorous means to verify compliance, the very idea of protocols for interoperation is subverted. We develop an approach for testing whether the behavior of an agent complies with a commitment protocol. Our approach requires the specification of commitment protocols in temporal logic, and involves a novel way of synthesizing and applying ideas from distributed computing and logics of program.
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paper_title: The Event Calculus Explained

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This article presents the event calculus, a logic-based formalism for representing actions and their effects. A circumscriptive solution to the frame problem is deployed which reduces to monotonic predicate completion. Using a number of benchmark examples from the literature, the formalism is shown to apply to a variety of domains, including those featuring actions with indirect effects, actions with nondeterministic effects, concurrent actions, and continuous change.
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paper_title: An abductive event calculus planner

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Abstract In 1969 Cordell presented his seminal description of planning as theorem proving with the situation calculus. The most pleasing feature of Green's account was the negligible gap between high-level logical specification and practical implementation. This paper attempts to reinstate the ideal of planning via theorem proving in a modern guise. In particular, the paper shows that if we adopt the event calculus as our logical formalism and employ abductive logic programming as our theorem proving technique, then the computation performed mirrors closely that of a hand-coded partial-order planning algorithm. Soundness and completeness results for this logic programming implementation are given. Finally the paper shows that, if we extend the event calculus in a natural way to accommodate compound actions, then using the same abductive theorem proving techniques we can obtain a hierarchical planner.
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paper_title: Commitment Machines

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We develop an approach in which we model communication protocols via commitment machines. Commitment machines supply a content to protocol states and actions in terms of the social commitments of the participants. The content can be reasoned about by the agents thereby enabling flexible execution of the given protocol. We provide reasoning rules to capture the evolution of commitments through the agents' actions. Because of its representation of content and its operational rules, a commitment machine effectively encodes a systematically enhanced version of the original protocol, which allows the original sequences of actions as well as other legal moves to accommodate exceptions and opportunities. We show how a commitment machine can be compiled into a finite state machine for efficient execution, and prove soundness and completeness of our compilation procedure.
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paper_title: A computational theory of normative positions

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The Kanger-Lindahl theory of normative positions attempts to use a combination of deontic logic (the logic of obligation and permission) and a logic of action/agency to give a formal account of obligations, duties, rights, and other complex normative concepts. This paper presents a generalization and further development of this theory, together with methods for its automation and application to practical examples. The resulting theory is intended to be applied in the representation and analysis of laws, regulations, and contracts, in the specification of aspects of computer systems, in multiagent systems, and as a contribution to the formal theory of organizations. Particular attention is paid to representations at varying levels of detail and the relationships that hold between them. The last part presents Norman-G, an automated support system intended to facilitate application of the theory to the analysis of practical problems, with a small example to illustrate its use.
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paper_title: Checking correctness of business contracts via commitments

paper_content:

Business contracts tend to be complex. In current practice, contracts are often designed by hand and adopted by their participants after, at best, a manual analysis. This paper motivates and formalizes two aspects of contract correctness from the perspective of the preferences of the agents participating in them. A contract is safe for a participant if participating in the contract would not leave the participant worse off than otherwise. More strongly, a contract is beneficial to a participant if participating in the contract would leave the participant better off than otherwise. ::: ::: This paper seeks to partially automate reasoning about the correctness of formally modeled business contracts. It represents contracts formally as a set of commitments. It motivates constraints on how cooperative agents might value the various states of commitments. Further, it shows that such constraints are consistent and promote cooperation. Lastly, it presents algorithms for checking the safety and guaranteed benefits of a contract.
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paper_title: A Social Semantics for Agent Communication Languages

paper_content:

The ability to communicate is one of the salient properties of agents. Although a number of agent communication languages (ACLs) have been developed, obtaining a suitable formal semantics for ACLs remains one of the greatest challenges of multiagent systems theory. Previous semantics have largely been mentalistic in their orientation and are based solely on the beliefs and intentions of the participating agents. Such semantics are not suitable for most multiagent applications, which involve autonomous and heterogeneous agents, whose beliefs and intentions cannot be uniformly determined. Accordingly, we present a social semantics for ACLs that gives primacy to the interactions among the agents. Our semantics is based on social commitments and is developed in temporal logic. This semantics, because of its public orientation, is essential to providing a rigorous basis for multiagent protocols.
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paper_title: Interaction protocols as design abstractions for business processes

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Business process modeling and enactment are notoriously complex, especially in open settings, where business partners are autonomous, requirements must be continually finessed, and exceptions frequently arise because of real-world or organizational problems. Traditional approaches, which attempt to capture processes as monolithic flows, have proven inadequate in addressing these challenges. We propose (business) protocols as components for developing business processes. A protocol is an abstract, modular, publishable specification of an interaction among different roles to be played by different participants. When instantiated with the participants' internal policies, protocols yield concrete business processes. Protocols are reusable and refinable, thus simplifying business process design. We show how protocols and their composition are theoretically founded in the phi;-calculus.
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paper_title: Formalizing a Language for Institutions and Norms

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One source of trust for physical trading systems is their physical assets and simply their presence. A similar baseline does not exist for electronic trading systems, but one way in which it may be possible to create that initial trust is through the abstract notion of an institution, defined in terms of norms [19] and the scenes within which (software) agents may play roles in different trading activities, governed by those norms. We present here a case for institutions in electronic trading, a specification language for institutions (covering norms, performative structure, scenes, roles, etc.) and its semantics and how this may be mapped into formal languages such as process algebra and various forms of logic, so that there is a framework within which norms can be stated and proven.
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paper_title: Implementing norms in electronic institutions

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Ideally, open multi-agent systems (MAS) involve heterogeneous and autonomous agents whose interactions ought to conform to some shared conventions. The challenge is how to express and enforce such conditions so that truly autonomous agents can adscribe to them. One way of addressing this issue is to look at MAS as environments regulated by some sort of normative framework. There have been significant contributions to the formal aspects of such normative frameworks, but there are few proposals that have made them operational. In this paper a possible step towards closing that gap is suggested. A normative language is introduced which is expressive enough to represent the familiar types of MAS-inspired normative frameworks; its implementation in JESS is also shown. This proposal is aimed at adding flexibility and generality to electronic institutions by extending their deontic components through richer types of norms that can still be enforced on-line.
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paper_title: Verifying norm consistency in electronic institutions

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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.
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paper_title: Towards a test-bed for trading agents in electronic auction markets

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We present a framework for defining trading scenarios based on fish market auctions. In these scenarios, trading (buyer and seller) heterogeneous (human and software) agents of arbitrary complexity participate in auctions under a collection of standardized market conditions and are evaluated against their actual market performance. We argue that such competitive situations constitute convenient problem domains in which to study issues related with agent architectures in general and agentdbased trading strategies in particular.The proposed framework, conceived and implemented as an extension of FM96.5 (a Javadbased version of the Fishmarket auction house), constitutes a testdbed for trading agents in auction tournament environments, FM97.6.Finally, we illustrate how to generate tournaments with the aid of our testdbed by defining and running a very simple tournament involving a set of rudimentary buyer agents.
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Title: Specifying Open Agent Systems: A Survey

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Provide an overview of open agent systems, including their characteristics, significance, and examples. Discuss the aim of the paper and the structure of the survey.

Section 2: Artificial Social Systems
Description 2: Discuss the approach and methodologies of artificial social systems, including the design-time specification of social laws and the properties of social laws.

Section 3: Commentary on Artificial Social Systems
Description 3: Provide critical commentary on the artificial social systems approach, focusing on permissions, non-conformance, semantics, and computational tasks.

Section 4: Enterprise Modelling
Description 4: Review the work on modelling computational enterprises/organisations, including the roles, goals, processes, policies, skills, and authority within the organisation.

Section 5: Commentary on Enterprise Modelling
Description 5: Offer critical comments on enterprise modelling with an emphasis on normative relations, non-compliance, semantics, and computational tasks.

Section 6: Commitment Protocols
Description 6: Review the concept and formalisation of commitment protocols, including the various semantics and representations used in specifying these protocols.

Section 7: Commentary on Commitment Protocols
Description 7: Provide a critique of the commitment protocols, focusing on normative relations, non-compliance mechanisms, and the computational support provided by these protocols.

Section 8: Electronic Institutions
Description 8: Discuss the systematic approach to designing and developing multi-agent systems using Electronic Institutions, including roles, dialogic framework, scenes, performative structure, and normative rules.

Section 9: Commentary on Electronic Institutions
Description 9: Provide critical analysis of Electronic Institutions, particularly their approach to permissions, obligations, normative rules, non-compliance mechanisms, and computational support.

Section 10: Discussion
Description 10: Summarise the findings from the reviews of the four approaches, discussing the representation of normative relations, the handling of non-compliance, the expressiveness of the formalisms, and the support for computational tasks.