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Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence

A Framework for Normative MultiAgent Organisations

Profile image of Jomi Fred HubnerJomi Fred Hubner

2009

https://doi.org/10.4230/DAGSEMPROC.09121.6
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25 pages

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Abstract

The social and organisational aspects of agency have led to a good amount of theoretical work in terms of formal models and theories. From these different works normative multiagent systems and multiagent organisations are particularily considered in this paper. Embodying such models and theories in the conception and engineering of proper infrastructures that achieve requirements of openness and adaptation, is still an open issue. In this direction, this paper presents and discusses a framework for normative multiagent organisations. Based on the Agents and Artifacts meta-model (A&A), it introduces organisational artifacts as first class entities to instrument the normative organisation for supporting agents activities within it.

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2007

The social and organisational aspects of agency have have become nowadays a major focus of interest in the MAS community, and a good amount of theoretical work is available, in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of proper organisational infrastructures embodying such models and theories is still an open issue, in particular when open MAS are considered. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss a model for an organisational infrastructure called ORA4MAS that aims at addressing these issues. By being based on the A&A (Agents and Artifacts) meta-model, the key and novel aspect introduced with ORA4MAS is that organisations and the organisation infrastructure itself are conceived in terms of agents and artifacts, as first-class basic abstractions giving body to the MAS from design to runtime. This is in analogy with human organisation and organisation infrastructures, that are populated by humans (as participants and part of the organisation machinery), and by rich sets of artifacts and tools that humans use to support their activities inside the organisation and the organisation itself, encapsulating essential infrastructure services.

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Using a normative organisational model to specify and manage an institution for multi-agent systems
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Nowadays multi-agent applications are more and more openness. That brings the risk to deal with to autonomous agents i.e. agents not respecting the society rules. To insure a coherent behaviour the application require tools to control and regulate the system overall functioning. Moreover they should provide the system with mechanisms to enforce global laws on the autonomous agents operating in it. This paper presents an institution multi-agent layer called S YNAI. Implemented with different agents, the institution functioning is itself specified as a normative organisation model making explicit how the overall system should be controlled. Using an iTV game application, we illustrate how such a specification is useful to help the agents to function in the system.

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Designing and Programming Organisational Infrastructures for Agents situated in Artifact-based Environments
Michele Piunti

www-lia.deis.unibo.it

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A model of almost everything: Norms, structure and ontologies in agent organizations
Javier Vazquez-Salceda

2004

Abstract OMNI is a framework for modelling agent organizations, that allows the balance of global organizational requirements with the autonomy of individual agents. OMNI also integrates the norms that regulate interaction between agents, as well as the contextual meaning of those interactions into one framework. In order to make design of the multi-agent system manageable, we distinguish three levels of abstraction with increasing implementation detail.

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A Distributed Normative Infrastructure for Situated Multi-agent Organisations
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Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

In most of the existing approaches to the design of multiagent systems, there is no clear way in which to relate organisational and normative structures to the model of the environment where they are to be situated and operate. Our work addresses this problem by putting together, in a practical approach to developing multi-agent systems (and social simulations in particular), a high-level environment modelling language that incorporates aspects of agents, organisations, and normative structures. The paper explains in some detail how the ideas of normative objects and normative places, put together as a distributed normative infrastructure, allow the definition of certain kinds of situated multi-agent organisations, in particular organisations for multi-agent systems that operate within concrete environments. Normative objects are environment objects used to explicitly convey normative content that regulate the behaviour of agents within the place where such objects can be perceived by agents. The paper briefly introduces such concepts, showing how they were integrated into the MAS-SOC multi-agent systems platform for social simulation, and hints on new problems of (situated) organisational and normative structures that were brought forward by the work presented here.

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Related topics

  • Computer Science
  • Philosophy of Agency
  • Knowledge Management
  • Multi Agent System
  • Openness to experience
  • Normative Multiagent Systems
  • Data Processing and Computer Sci...
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