Bruno Rosell

AMELI: An Agent-Based Middleware for Electronic Institutions

The design and development of open multi-agent systems (MAS) is a key aspect in agent research. We advocate that they can be realised as electronic institutions. In this paper we focus on the execution of electronic institutions by introducing AMELI, an infrastructure that mediates agentsý interactions while enforcing institutional rules. An innovative feature of AMELI is that it is of general purpose (it can interpret any institution specification), and therefore it can be regarded as domain-independent. The combination of ISLANDER [5] and AMELI provides full support for the design and development of electronic institutions.

Human interactions in electronic institutions

Every social network has its own fixed, but different, set of rules that apply to all users. This reflects the fact that in real life every community has different norms depending on the relationships between its members. Unfortunately this has required people to create many different social networks that exist next to each other even though they have largely overlapping sets of members. In this paper we argue that Electronic Institutions (EI) solve this problem by allowing to create a generic social network in which users can set up their own sub-communities with their own particular norms and protocols. Electronic Institutions make it easy for users to specify these protocols and norms in a visual way, and adapt them when necessary. Furthermore we present a new framework on top of the existing EI architecture that allows humans to interact in any EI. It can generate a graphic user interface from the institution-specification without the requirement of any extra programming or design. However, it still allows designers to design a more sophisticated, domain specific GUI.

Engineering Autonomic Electronic Institutions

There is a growing interest in the study and development of self-* systems motivated by the need for information systems capable of self-management in distributed, open, and dynamic scenarios. Unfortunately,there is a lack of frameworks that support the intricate task of developing self-* systems. We try to make headway along this direction by introducing a framework, EIDE-*, to support the engineering of a particular type of self-* systems, namely autonomic electronic institutions: regulated environments capable of adapting their norms to comply with institutional goals despite the varying behaviours of their participating agents.

ABC4MAS: Assembling Business Collaborations for MAS

ABC4MAS provides an environment to support the rapid assembly of agent-oriented business collaborations. ABC4MAS allows: (i) to set up a collaboration environment (CE) as a virtual organisation, (ii) to reach agreements within the CE to form short-term business collaborations, (iii) to enact business collaborations, and (iv) to track the performance of agents within business collaborations to build their trust and reputation within the CE.

An Environment to Build and Track Agent-Based Business Collaboration

This chapter describes an environment to support the rapid assembly of agent-oriented business collaborations. Our environment allows: (i) setting up a collaboration environment as a virtual organization; (ii) reaching agreements within the collaboration environment to form short-term business collaborations; (iii) enacting business collaborations; and (iv) tracking the performance of agents within business collaborations to build their trust and reputation within the collaboration environment.