From Human Regulations to Regulated Software

Internet, as an extension of the real world, is affected by the regulations of one or several countries on activities carried out through the web. For instance, Electronic Commerce activities between two parties are regulated by the law of the parties’ countries plus international commerce treaties. In the HealthCare field, highly regulated, the citizens’ rights are precisely defined and regulated by national and international laws. How to make sure that such norms and regulations are met on the activities and information exchanges through Internet? How to create mechanisms to enforce norm compliance, and therefore, increase trust between individuals and companies? In most software and agent methodologies, these external regulations, along with the internal norms and regulations of the organization to be modelled, are seen only as extra requirements in the analysis phase of the system. If either the external or the internal regulations change (as they usually do from time to time), it becomes very hard to track all the changes to be done in the implementation, as there is no explicit representation of the norms and regulations, but a chain of design decisions that were guided by the norms’ requirements (i.e., if norms are embedded in the agents’ design and code, all the design steps have to be checked again and all the code verified to ensure compliance with new regulations). The alternative is to have an explicit representation of the norms. Research on Distributed Artificial Intelligence has created the concept of Electronic Institutions. As their human counterparts, an Electronic Institution is an entity defining a set of norms over the behaviour of individuals inside the institution. Last years research in electronic institutions has focused on the use of Software Agent technology. An AgentMediated Electronic Institution (e-institution for short) belongs to a new and promising field where interactions between a group of (software) agents are regulated by means of a corpora of explicit norms, expressed in a computational language that agents can interpret. An e-institution [6] [7] is a safe environment mediating in the interaction of agents. The expected behaviour of agents in such an environment is described by means of an explicit specification of norms, which is a) expressive enough, b) readable by agents, and c) easy to maintain.