Javier Vázquez-Salceda

Organizing Multiagent Systems

Despite all the research done in the last years on the development of methodologies for designing MAS, there is no methodology suitable for the specification and design of MAS in complex domains where both the agent view and the organizational view can be modeled. Current multiagent approaches either take a centralist, static approach to organizational design or take an emergent view in which agent interactions are not pre-determined, thus making it impossible to make any predictions on the behavior of the whole systems. Most of them also lack a model of the norms in the environment that should rule the (emergent) behavior of the agent society as a whole and/or the actions of individuals. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling agent organizations, Organizational Model for Normative Institutions (OMNI), that allows the balance of global organizational requirements with the autonomy of individual agents. It specifies global goals of the system independently from those of the specific agents that populate the system. Both the norms that regulate interaction between agents, as well as the contextual meaning of those interactions are important aspects when specifying the organizational structure.

The provenance of electronic data

It would include details of the processes that produced electronic data as far back as the beginning of time or at least the epoch of provenance awareness.

OMNI: introducing social structure, norms and ontologies into agent organizations

In this paper, we propose a framework for modelling agent organizations, Omni, that allows the balance of global organizational requirements with the autonomy of individual agents. It specifies global goals of the system independently from those of the specific agents that populate the system. Both the norms that regulate interaction between agents, as well as the contextual meaning of those interactions are important aspects when specifying the organizational structure. Omni integrates all this aspects in one framework. In order to make design of the multi-agent system manageable, we distinguish three levels of abstraction with increasing implementation detail. All dimensions of Omni have a formal logical semantics, which ensures consistency and possibility of verification of the different aspects of the system. Omni is therefore utmost suitable for the modelling of all types of MAS from open to closed environments.

Towards a Formalisation of Electronic Contracting Environments

Clauses within contracts may be thought of as norms, specifying permissions, obligations and prohibitions on contract parties. In this paper, we present a formal representation of contracts, focusing on the specification of a model of norms. With this model, a norm is associated with a status, which may change as the environment, and the status of other norms, changes. We define a normative environment, which may be used to track the status of a set of norms throughout their lifecycle, and then describe a predicates that may be used to evaluate a norms status. Agents are able to use these predicates to reason about the status of norms, and how their actions will affect the normative environment. Finally, we show the applicability of our framework to real world domains by monitoring the execution of a contract taken from a real world scenario.

Implementing Norms in Multiagent Systems

There is a wide agreement on the use of norms in order to specify the expected behaviour of agents in open MAS. However, current norm formalisms focus on the declarative nature of norms. In order to be implemented, these norms should be translated into operational representations. In this paper we present our preliminary work on implementation of norm enforcement and issues on verifiability that highly affect this enforcement. We propose some mechanisms to be included in agent platforms in order to ease the implementation.

Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Multi-Agent Systems

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multiagent Systems, ANIREM 2005, and the International Workshop on Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, OOOP 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in July 2005 as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. This volume is the first in a series focussing on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. The 17 papers in this volume are extended, revised versions of the best papers presented at the ANIREM and the OOOP workshops at AAMAS 2005 that were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers from the two workshops have been re-grouped around the following themes: modelling, analyzing and programming organizations, modelling and analyzing institutions, modelling normative designs, as well as evaluation and regulation.

Modelling electronic organizations

Institutions are established to regulate the interactions between parties that are performing some (business) transaction. One of the main roles of institutions is to inspire trust into the parties that perform the transaction. The main focus of this paper is how an electronic organization should be specified on the basis of the abstract patterns given by the institution on which the organization is formed, i.e., how can we define a (formal) relation between the (abstract) norms specified in the institutional regulations and the concrete rules and procedures of the organization such that the agents will operate within the organization according to the institutional norms or can be punished when they are violating the norms.

Provenance in Agent-Mediated Healthcare Systems

People are increasingly cooperating to share electronic information and techniques throughout various industries. In healthcare applications, data (a single patients healthcare history), workflow (procedures carried out on that patient), and logs (a recording of meaningful procedural events) are often distributed among several heterogeneous and autonomous information systems. Understanding a patients treatment history can help healthcare providers make treatment decisions. Provenance-aware applications can facilitate this process by tracing events, event dependencies, and provider decisions across various healthcare institutions

The Role of Norms and Electronic Institutions in Multi-Agent Systems

Institutions are established to regulate the interactions between parties that are performing some (business) transaction. The main focus of the dissertation is how an electronic organization (e-organization) should be specified on the basis of the abstract patterns given by the institution on which the organization is formed (i.e., how can we define a formal relation between the abstract norms specified in the institutional regulations and the concrete rules and procedures of the organization such that the agents will operate within the organization according to the institutional norms or can be punished when they are violating the norms).

Applying provenance in distributed organ transplant management

The use of ICT solutions applied to Healthcare in distributed scenarios should not only provide improvements in the distributed processes and services they are targeted to assist but also provide ways to trace all the meaningful events and decisions taken in such distributed scenario. Provenance is an innovative way to trace such events and decisions in Distributed Health Care Systems, by providing ways to recover the origin of the collected data from the patients and/or the medical processes. Here we present a work in progress to apply provenance in the domain of distributed organ transplant management.