Engineering open environments with electronic institutions

Nowadays, with the expansion of Internet, there is a need of methodologies and software tools to ease the development of applications where distributed homogeneous entities can participate. Multiagent systems, and electronic institutions in particular, can play a main role on the development of this type of systems. Electronic institutions define the rules of the game in agent societies, by fixing what agents are permitted and forbidden to do and under what circumstances. The goal of this Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science 10 November 2004 paper is to present EIDE, an integrated development environment for supporting the engineering of multiagent systems as electronic institutions.