Verifying Norm Consistency in Electronic Institutions

Electronic institutions are a formalism to define and analyse protocols among agents with a view to achieving global and individual goals. In this paper we elaborate on the verification of properties of electronic institutions based on the dialogues that agents may hold. Specifically, we provide a computational approach to assess whether an electronic institution is normatively consistent. In this manner, given an electronic institution we can determine whether its norms prevent normcompliant executions from happening. For this we strongly rely on the analysis of the dialogues that may occur as agents interact by exchanging illocutions in an electronic institution.