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Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

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Abstract

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions.

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Notes

  1. For reason of conciseness we do not discuss our meta-metamodel and the relations existing between it and the meta-metamodel defined by UML.

  2. Following Searle (Searle 1995), the construction of social reality in the human world is possible thanks to constitutive rules of the form X counts as Y in C.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università della Svizzera italiana, via G. Buffi 13, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland

    Nicoletta Fornara, Francesco Viganò & Marco Colombetti

  2. Università degli Studi di Bergamo, via Salvecchio 19, Bergamo, 24100, Italy

    Mario Verdicchio

  3. Politecnico di Milano, piazza Leonardo Da Vinci 32, Milano, Italy

    Marco Colombetti

Authors
  1. Nicoletta Fornara
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  2. Francesco Viganò
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  3. Mario Verdicchio
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  4. Marco Colombetti
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Correspondence to Nicoletta Fornara.

Additional information

Partially supported by Swiss National Science Foundation project 200021-100260, "An Open Interaction Framework for Communicative Agents".

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Fornara, N., Viganò, F., Verdicchio, M. et al. Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems. Artif Intell Law 16, 89–105 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-007-9055-z

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